Culture

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

WASHINGTON - The prostitution scandal that has embroiled the Secret Service is not evidence of a wider culture of boozing and paying for sex among those who are trained to take a bullet for the president, the director of the agency told skeptical senators. The senators challenged Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to explain how it was possible, without an atmosphere of permissiveness among the agency's supervisors, that 12 agents could go out in separate groups on April 11 in Cartagena, Colombia, independently decide to bring women back to their hotel rooms, and then sign the women in at the front desk next to the agents' real names.

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa. As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair.

The magnitude 6.0 earthquake that hit northern Italy early Sunday has claimed the lives of six people and has caused widespread damage. Among the most badly hit sites were a number of cultural heritage structures, according to reports. Italy's cultural ministry said that "after an initial survey, damage to cultural patrimony appears significant. " One of the hardest hit areas was San Felice sul Panaro, a town near Bologna, which saw serious damage to a 14th century castle and to churches that housed valuable paintings and frescoes.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

A tangy, sour, fermented milk drink may not sound like a likely candidate to move from health food stores to mainstream supermarkets, but that's exactly what kefir has done. The beverage is steadily gaining fans convinced of the health benefits -- proponents tout its purported ability to help cure cancer, reduce high cholesterol and treat high blood pressure -- yet the scientific studies to support the claims are still few. Kefir's closest cousin is yogurt, also made by fermenting milk with bacteria.

The nine young women of Girls' Generation sauntered onto the performance stage of "Late Show With David Letterman. " Flanked by a DJ and live drummer, the South Korean pop group wore lacy black mini-dresses and thigh-high leather boots, as if they were hosting a goth cocktail party. It was a rare American network television performance from a South Korean music group. The song they performed on the January show, a slinky bit of minor-key dance-pop called "The Boys," owed an obvious debt to Kelis' catcalling hit "Milkshake.

For Wang Zan, nine months of pregnancy and a caesarean delivery were difficult enough. The last thing she wanted was a monthlong ordeal that her mother and generations of mothers before her had to endure afterward. According to this tradition, the woman must stay in bed behind closed windows, cover her head, give up bathing, washing her hair and even brushing her teeth.

In general, do you feel happy? If you had a second chance in life, would you rather be an honest farmer, a hard-working laborer, a worry-free civil servant, a respected manager, a designer, an office clerk, a teacher, a homemaker, or stay in your current profession? What would make you happier? It seems almost gratuitous to be posing such questions in a country where income levels have increased fivefold in half a generation. But the Chinese are discovering one of life's greatest lessons: that money doesn't necessarily buy you happiness.

Her relatives had always described her as a colicky baby. When Luo Cuifen was 26, she found out a likely reason why. Doctors discovered more than two dozen sewing needles embedded in her body, some piercing her vital organs. X-rays of her head and torso look like a dart board. Doctors believe the needles were driven into her body when Luo was days old. One in the top of her skull could only have been stuck there when the bones in her head were still soft.

Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises. "Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does," said Juan Felipe Herrera, 63. "People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. " Herrera then launched into poems by Federico García Lorca and other 20th century masters and had students recite their own compositions for group critiques.

Motion picture executive Brad Kembel and his partner Jimmy Ferrareze have bought the landmark James Eads How House in Silver Lake for $1.3 million. Designed by modern architect Rudolph Schindler in 1925, the restored and updated International Modern-style house had been priced at $4.995 million when movie producer and prolific renovator Michael LaFetra first listed it in 2008. The 2,426-square-foot home, a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, is considered a triumph of Schindler's early career and was influenced by his apprenticeship under Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of the greatest first films in all of American cinema, "Being John Malkovich" (1999) introduced audiences to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, two of the most distinctive voices in contemporary movies. A mad scramble of surrealist tropes and philosophical ideas, it marked the acme of Hollywood's passing interest in existentialist postmodernism, which manifested itself through the '90s in such meta-movies as"Groundhog Day,""The Truman Show" and"The Matrix. " Thirteen years on, "Being John Malkovich" - which the Criterion Collection is releasing on DVD andBlu-raythis week - has lost none of its lunatic charm.

BEIJING - Orgies and anal sex hardly seem the usual fodder of traditional Chinese folk art, but that is exactly what one Chinese artist is depicting in a series of provocative paper-cuts that are now being exhibited in Los Angeles for the first time. Paper-cuts originated in Eastern Han Dynasty China (AD 25-220) and are hung on windows or doors for good luck. But instead of the usual decorative flowers and birds, Xiyadie, whose pseudonym means "Siberian Butterfly," portrays graphic and daring depictions of homosexual love - long considered taboo in China.

"What's the difference between Jewish and Chinese mah jong?" the protagonist of Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" asks her mother about the quintessential Chinese game. Her mother replies, "Entirely different kind of playing.... Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their eyes. " "Project Mah Jongg," a colorful exhibition opening Thursday (through Sept. 2) at the Skirball Cultural Center, tells the Jewish side of the story. With vintage photographs, souvenirs, playing guides and other ephemera, and of course examples of the tiles themselves, the exhibition traces how the game was enthusiastically adopted and integrated into the social life of Jewish women in the 20th century.

The coolest place in Hollywood is a sauna inside the health center at El Centro and Selma that's been around since the mid-1980s. I was reminded of this the other day after a conversation with a Guatemalan maintenance man named Romulo and a retired auto mechanic from Ecuador named Victor. We sat sweating together as they discussed Victor's house in Ecuador. He wanted to sell it but couldn't. The idea pained Victor, as he'd bought the house hoping his kids might want to experience his home country.

Whispering like conspirators, the two cousins hook their thumbs in their belt loops, skim cocky eyes over the women and swivel, stiff-legged from their hips, like the men they have become. Across the room, and a few steps away on the gender spectrum, a man with shaggy hair wrinkles a pug nose in the mirror and struggles to drape a silky scarf over his head in the style of Islamic womanhood.

It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room.

It had only been a few years since Adam Yauch had found fame as the in-your-face rapper and bass player MCA in the transgressive, boundary-breaking trio the Beastie Boys. But in 1992 he was searching for something else, traveling in Nepal to snowboard and pursue a growing interest in Buddhism when he came upon a group of Tibetan refugees. The encounter intensified his interest in the teachings of the Dalai Lama, and he was soon one of the world's leading advocates for the cause of Tibetan independence.

JAIPUR, India - It was a hot, dusty morning here in the capital of Rajasthan as the cast of "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" slowly emerged from several battered "vanity" buses lined up in front of the iconic City Palace. Despite the all-star team of British actors and actresses, including Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Maggie Smith, the big attraction for hundreds of gawking passersby was young Dev Patel, of"Slumdog Millionaire" fame. The film, which opens in U.S. theaters Friday, is about seven middle-class Britons whose savings have melted down with the global economy.