There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God." That confession of faith, the shahada, is professed by all Muslims, be they the 700 million Sunnis who dominate the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia or the 90 million Shi'ites who rule Iran and form majorities in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq. To the shahada, however, the Shi'ites add, "And Ali is the Friend of God." Those additional words in praise of Ali, whom the Shi'ites passionately ...

While the high visibility of my public life has not always brought me personal peace and happiness, it has lent a certain universal quality to my various metamorphoses. Because I believed that to be loved I had to be perfect, I moved "out of myself"--my body--early on and have spent much of my life searching to come home ... to be embodied. I didn't understand this until I was in my 60s and started writing this book. I have come ...

In October 2000, I found myself drinking champagne in an east London bar with Molly Ringwald. I'd had the usual schoolboy interest in the coltish American actress ever since The Breakfast Club; she was visiting town and a mutual friend suggested we meet. Molly wore fishnet stockings and her hair was short and brown. We talked about a sitcom she was developing, and about the U.S. presidential race. When the bottle was empty she went off to have dinner ...

"My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy," says Elyn Saks, the author of The Center Cannot Hold . It's hard to argue with that. While Saks has soared to the top of academia — a graduate degree from Oxford, a law degree from Yale, and a tenured professorship at the University of Southern California — she has also been shackled and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. Saks, 52, has schizophrenia, a ...

Liz, a Shi'ite in her late 20s, is afraid to leave her house. She says that the last time she went out, government-hired thugs stopped her car at one of the many checkpoints that litter Manama, the capital of Bahrain. They pulled her out, asked for her identity card and tried to ascertain one thing: whether she was Sunni or Shi'ite. "It's pure racial profiling," she says a few days later, sitting in her family's living room in ...

Why don't people wear shirts when they shop at Walmart? Or pants that fit? Has that woman been wearing a fanny pack for 15 years or did she just recently pick up on the belt-as-purse trend? Is that guy wearing a cape? People of Walmart, a website that launched earlier this month, catalogs the gloriously absurd attire that is sported by the big-box retailer's customer base. There are photos of fat people in sweatpants, a child with a ...

Public interest in "The Real Housewives" of hither and yon notwithstanding, the well-behaved trophy wife is not, generally speaking, a character we're dying to know more about. And beautiful Pippa Lee is a trophy wife of the highest order. Polite, restrained and seemingly vacant, the heroine of writer/director Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, cooks a mean butterflied lamb, keeps a meticulous house and floats around in silky pajamas, all the while gazing fondly at her ...

If you want to understand the disconnect between watching cooking shows and wanting to cook, get this: Schwan's Home Service is offering Top Chef--branded frozen meals. The idea that hard-core fans who study contestants' knife skills every week would choose to order from a giant company that's been delivering frozen food to rural America for 57 years doesn't surprise Harry Balzer, who tracks food trends for the market-research firm NPD Group. "You're going to eat four to five times ...

Soupy Sales, a comedian from the golden era of television, died Thursday. He was 83. The funny man seen many times on popular game shows died at a New York hospice, said Paul Dver, Sales' longtime friend and manager. "We have lost a comedy American icon," Dver said. "I feel the personal loss, and I also feel the magic that he had around him being gone. That's a much more severe loss than a loss of a friend." Sales was ...

Tiger Woods made it a perfect five wins from five matches as he crushed Y.E.Yang 6 and 5 to clinch the Presidents Cup for the United States in the concluding singles against the Internationals on Sunday. The world number one has proved invincible all week at Harding Park in San Francisco and gained a measure of revenge on South Korean Yang, who denied him the title in the final round of this year's PGA Championship. The decisive victory took the ...