Daily News Channel
Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock once sagely declared, “Live every week like it’s Shark Week!” But what does that mean? You could say it means to seize the day, to live as if at any moment, a hammerhead might chomp through your torso.
For black American men of a certain generation — my generation — the death of Michael Jackson is a particularly heavy loss. One of my best memories of MJ is from my seventh birthday party, in September 1984.
If further proof were needed that the world is in a chastened mood these days, there’s this: the Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in the field, will go this year to Peter Zumthor of Switzerland. At 65, Zumthor is to architecture what Samuel Beckett is to literature, a man who has set out to draw maximum impact from a bare minimum of means.
Following decades of debate over the nation’s wartime history, France’s highest judicial body has formally ruled that the French state bears moral and legal responsibility for the deportation of nearly 76,000 Jews during the nation’s WWII occupation. In doing so, the court officially recognized the willful participation of France’s collaborationist Vichy government in anti-Semitic persecution that had long been attributed to Nazi occupying powers. The ruling Monday, by the Conseil d’Etat, or State Council, was cheered by organizations representing French Jews and families of Jews who were deported during the war — a mere 3,000 of whom ultimately returned