The Church of Scientology is a notoriously difficult subject for a journalist. The press has long been considered an enemy of the Church, which was founded half a century ago by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Writer/director Mike Mills's Beginners features a gay widower, Hal , coming out of the closet at 75. His grown son Oliver stands by bemused as his father rips through a bucket list he's been secretly adding to through 45 years of straight marriage. There's plenty of potential for cuteness there; Beginners could be Cocoon with chaps. But that's not enough for Mills. He throws in Hal's adorable Jack Russell terrier Arthur. who cocks his head and ...

In "Farangs," a short story by Thai-American writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap, a guesthouse owner grumbles about foreign tourists and their narrow tastes. "P---y and elephants," she says. "That's all these people want." Actually, we foreigners want much more. We want a drug-dealing monkey and an ass-kicking monk. We want a facial tattoo, men with breasts, and Mike Tyson tunelessly singing "One Night in Bangkok." And we get them all in The Hangover Part II, a sequel to the highest-grossing ...

Surely the most eagerly awaited film of the summer, J.J. Abrams' Super 8 whisks the viewer back to a night in 1979, when some Ohio kids shooting a zombie movie witness a terrible train crash. What escaped from the train, and what the kids do to find it, are just two of the secrets that fans of Abrams's Lost, Alias, Cloverfield and the Star Trek reboot have tried valiantly to unearth. All will be revealed Friday, June ...

Have you ever found yourself saying, "Ah, a fine spring day at last! I wish I had a ramp to gnaw on!" No? Then you're unlike the many, many chefs and green-market enthusiasts across the country who constitute the Church of the Ramp. Of course, they don't really gnaw on raw ramps, also known as wild leeks; they pickle them, char them and do a million other artful things with the onion-like stalk, the first green vegetable ...

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: ...

It has been 20 years since best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell began work on her first novel in the series chronicling the cases of forensic analyst Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel Prize for economics for work on how community institutions can prevent conflict, the Nobel Committee announced Monday. Ostrom becomes the first woman to win the prize in its 40-year history. The award was a "great surprise... I'm still a little bit in shock," she said by phone at the news conference announcing the prize. Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, was praised "for ...

A Russian writer who contradicted some authorities by suggesting that the hijacked cargo ship Arctic Sea was carrying something other than timber was fired after he fled Russia because of threats, he told CNN Friday. Mikhail Voitenko said in multiple media interviews that he caught the first flight to Istanbul, Turkey, this week to escape possible lawsuits or worse for his comments on the Arctic Sea saga. On Friday, he told CNN by cell phone that he had moved from ...

Brad Pitt gets top billing in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," but Austrian actor Christoph Waltz may have turned in the most memorable performance as a Nazi "Jew Hunter." Waltz, a 52-year-old veteran of German television, was hardly known outside of Europe, until now. Tarantino, insisting on actors with geographic origins similar to their characters, chose Waltz to play a complex and unforgettable villain: Nazi Col. Hans Landa. Landa mixes charm, humor and intelligence with great cruelty and opportunism ...