Imagine you live in a close-knit neighborhood. Everyone watches out for everyone else’s kids, and potluck dinners are the norm. Then, one day, the police come in and say there was a claim of child abuse against someone in the neighborhood. But instead of just taking away the abused children, they take you away too. Everyone in the neighborhood has the same values, so they must all be abusing their kids, right? Even though you know your parents never laid an unkind or inappropriate hand on you, you get dragged off with everyone else. While their case perhaps isn’t so cut and dry, for the members of a Texas polygamist sect, this has been their reality.
Just in case you live under a rock, or were on a cruise for the past week like some people (ahem), here’s some exciting news: David Cook won American Idol! And he won by more than twelve million votes! Even with a vote total of over ninety-seven million, Cook’s margin of victory was impressive. And to all of you who voted, I say this: thank you.
As a resident New Yorker of almost three years, I consider myself a seasoned subway rider. Along with my abilities to seamlessly weave in and out of a horde of crazed pedestrians and instinctively knowing a good slice of pizza by smell, I can navigate this city’s underground channels with an intuition so honed and precise, no distraction or sleepy stupor can stop me from snapping to attention the minute I arrive at my intended subway stop. So imagine my surprise when a book like Stephenie Meyer’s The Host manages to topple that delicate sixth sense on what was, no less, my second reading.
I grew up on the Indiana Jones movies. Not only was my mom a huge fan of the series, but I was fascinated by the classic serials and adventure pulps that inspired the films. They smartly played to childhood nostalgia, while adding enough self-aware humor and clever character development to make them appeal to modern audiences. I was really let down by the latest series of creator George Lucas’s Star Wars films, so when I found out that a new Indy film was in the works, I joined a lot of other fans in being pretty nervous about what the outcome would be. So, what’s the verdict?
I know that there are a lot of console-addicted gamers out there—I’m one of them. And as we all wait for the inevitable yet constantly-delayed release of Starcraft II, we’ll just have to sate ourselves with these five new releases, coming out in the next few weeks:
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