American Life

The vitality of "American Life" is in question, but there's no doubt that the spotlight still shines on "American Idol." A week after it debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. album sales chart, Madonna's "American Life" slid to No. 8. It sold just 91,000 copies in the last sales week, down from the 241,000 it registered during its its opening week, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

The Library of Congress opened an exhibit Thursday on 350 years of Jewish life in America. "From Haven to Home," which runs through Dec. 18, features a letter in which George Washington told the Newport (R.I.) Hebrew Congregation that the new republic gave "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." The exhibit features photographs of composer Leonard Bernstein and Bess Myerson, Miss America of 1945 and later New York City's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs.

Willie Robert Middlebrook, a photographer who sought to enlarge public perceptions of the African American community through painterly depictions of its people and places, died Saturday at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was 54. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered last month, said his daughter, Jessica Middlebrook. Middlebrook's death came just a week after the unveiling at the new Expo/Crenshaw Metro station of one of his largest public installations, a series of 24 mosaic panels based on his photographs.

PHUNG THI LE LY OF KY LA, Vietnam, is now Le Ly Hayslip of Escondido. The one-time teen-age Viet Cong collaborator is now an American citizen living in a ranch-style house, high atop a hill, surrounded by palm trees and the dry, rolling California landscape. She is worlds away from the rice paddies of war-torn Ky La. The memories, however, are never far away.

The 42 Japanese students crowded into an Oxnard College classroom Thursday morning to watch two students in giant white chefs hats create a swan out of a melon, strawberries and apples. They were visiting from the Kokusai Confectionary College outside Tokyo to see how their American counterparts make pastry. But Oxnard administrators hope this taste of American life, and sweets, will lure the students back for exchange programs.

David Ignatow, 83, who turned workaday American life into award-winning poetry, has died. Ignatow, who won the 1977 Bollinger Prize, was the author and editor of 27 books, including "I Have a Name," published in 1996, and "Shadowing the Ground," published in 1991. He wrote his first book, "Poems," in 1948 when he was working as a reporter for the Works Progress Administration Newspaper Project.

It started with the voice. The first time you heard it -- too nasal, muffled, verging on meek -- you knew Ira Glass was not reading from the standard radio script. Over the last 15 years, his "This American Life" has become a public radio institution, as Glass has continued to defy convention. He took his quirky feature program and aimed it at hard news. He beguiled enough solitary radio listeners that they came together last year, en masse, to watch his live show in movie theaters.

"This American Life," the public radio show hosted and narrated by Ira Glass, tries, and often succeeds, at being as big as the country itself, throwing open its doors and inviting in an ever-expanding cast who share with us a bit of their lives. It is a motley crew of storytellers, from literary giants to offbeat eccentrics to just plain folk.

As Thanksgiving nears, some of us are already giving thought to things we should be thankful for. At a living history demonstration Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center, your family might discover quite a few things to add to the list you may have come up with. Most people, for instance, should be grateful that they don't have to chop firewood, draw water from a well and stir lye into lard to make soap--all in order to prepare a meal and wash up.

MOVIES "This American Life" is a staple of your weekend NPR menu, and now you can move your "driveway moment" to an actual theater. Host Ira Glass joins David Sedaris, David Rakoff, Tig Notaro, the band OK Go and many others for this simulcast of live storytelling performances, music, animation and other exquisitely tasteful programming. 8 p.m. Thu. at various local theaters. See thisamericanlife.org for full schedule.

David Treuer never planned on writing nonfiction. "I was happy working on my novels," the fiction writer and USC professor says over the phone from Ann Arbor, where he is visiting the University of Michigan to talk about his new book, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life" (Grove: 330 pp., $26). "But after the Red Lake shooting in 2005" - in which a 16-year-old named Jeffrey James Weise went on a shooting spree at a school on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation - "I became upset and frustrated with the coverage.

The Pew Research Center released a report about Facebook on Friday, providing insights into the company that you won't find in its IPO filing. Rather than focusing on the company's financials, the report, "Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give," sheds light on how Facebook's 845 million users engage with Facebook and what they get out of it. The findings by the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that social interactions on...

Internet entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill was working in his Manhattan office when an FBI agent in a trench coat arrived with an envelope. It was fall 2004, and federal investigators were using new legal authority they had acquired after Sept. 11, 2001. Merrill ran a small Internet service provider with clients including IKEA, Mitsubishi and freelance journalists. The agent handed Merrill a document called a National Security Letter, which demanded that he turn over detailed records on one of his customers.

Gilbert "Magú" Luján — a painter, muralist and sculptor whose whimsical, slyly humorous art works, frequently evoking a rollicking, mythical view of Mexican American life, graced museum walls, the Hollywood and Vine subway station and other public places — died Sunday, according to a Facebook posting by his family. He was 70. The Pomona resident had been battling cancer for several years, according to a number of friends and colleagues who confirmed that he died. A pioneer of the Chicano art movement that took root in the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and '70s, Magú, as he was universally known, was among the first U.S. artists of Mexican descent to establish an international career.

We see them in airports or on the news: Men and women in military uniforms, reporting for duty, going to new assignments, returning home. We watch their tearful partings and joyous reunions. We may not know their names, but we have high regard for them and the institution they serve. In fact, the military is the most respected institution in American life. In poll after poll, the military and its leaders get high marks. That isn't true in many places around the world, where the military is often associated with corruption and brutality and has lost the trust of its citizenry.

The name change and the earring are immediate giveaways. Yes, Danny Daniels, a.k.a. Haratch Danielan, has adapted to American ways since his arrival in Northridge three years ago. But make no mistake, Daniels is a Cypriot at heart. A citizen of Cyprus, an island nation off the coasts of Turkey and Syria, Daniels comes from a world in which sons obey their fathers, even if it means putting off their dreams. At Vahram Danielan's insistence, his son came to America to pursue a college education.

It was a moment of naked honesty--like one of the mini-epiphanies that drives his public-radio show, "This American Life." When host Ira Glass asked a series of rhetorical questions during a speaking engagement at Loyola University in October, contributing editor Sarah Vowell interrupted him. "Do you know what I just realized?" she said in her playfully childlike timbre. "Every question you ask, you are just dying to have someone ask you."

My New American Life A Novel Francine Prose Harper: 306 pp., $25.99 Early in her writing life, Francine Prose developed an unmistakable voice: sharp, ironic, intelligent, uncompromising. Using this voice the way a miner uses a headlamp, she has crawled her way into the darkest corners of American life — suburbia, academia, post-Columbine public schools, society and culture post-9/11. Prose turns the American mind inside out, revealing all the fear, greed, paranoia, charisma and bullying within it. Her characters are often the people we read about in the news or hear about through six degrees (give or take a few)

Not all Internet users expect to get something for nothing ? at least not all the time, according to a report released Thursday by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Of the 755 users surveyed, 65% said they had paid to download or access some type of online content, with music and software being the most frequently purchased items. A third of respondents said they had paid for digital music, and, separately, for software. Other frequently purchased items included apps for cellphones and tablet computers (21%)