Playboy

"Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi is in the December issue of Playboy (on newsstands Nov. 20) wearing a lot of lace and not much else. In an interview, the 42-year-old single mom said she doesn't watch the Bravo cooking reality show that she has starred in for six years, and that she gains and loses the same 10 to 15 pounds every season. "I usually gain between 10 and 15 pounds over six weeks each season," Lakshmi said. "Then I spend 12 weeks working it off. But it's worth it. When the timer goes off and the food is ready, I'm really excited to eat. "I'm lucky.

Playboy Enterprises, that bastion of scantily clad bunny-women, will start opening clubs, cafes, hotels and retail outlets in India starting next month. But the businesses in the deeply religious country, where the raunchy magazine is still banned, will be decidedly more tame than the bosomy fare offered in the U.S. Mumbai-based PB Lifestyle has the exclusive brand license to open more than 120 Playboy centers over the next decade, Chief Executive Sanjay Gupta told Indian publication Economic Times . The first, a 22,000-square-foot club in the Goa beach region, will launch in mid-December.

This post has been corrected. See the note below. The announcement this week that Playboy is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Playboy Interview with a 50-interviews-in-50-days e-book series  sent me back to my bookshelves, where I've kept a copy G. Barry Golson's “The Playboy Interview” for 30 years. Golson's book, which I bought in college, collected the most prominent interviews of Playboy's first two decades, including in-depth conversations with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jimmy Hoffa, Miles Davis, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Jimmy Carter, who during the 1976 presidential campaign famously admitted that he had “committed adultery in my heart.” All these interviews (with the exception of Hoffa and Malcolm X, and you have to wonder why they're missing)

Without Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine and its philosophy of unfettered heterosexual hedonism through stimulation of all the senses, there would have been no LeRoy Neiman. Usually mischaracterized as simply a sports artist, he was actually much more than that. Neiman was the painter of the "Playboy Philosophy. " To be more specific, he was the artist for Playboy readers afraid that liking art was gay. Obituaries of the artist, who died Wednesday in New York City at 91, have duly noted his friendship with Hefner and longtime work for the magazine, starting in 1954.

As the 34th annual Playboy Jazz Festival wrapped up on Sunday, Bill Cosby danced across the stage to play his final solo beneath the iconic bunny. "It's my last time here," he announced to the applauding crowd, which filled the Hollywood Bowl to the last bleacher. "And I'm gonna give you something you've never heard before. Take it back to the bridge!" Cosby grabbed a trombone from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who followed his order with upbeat, New Orleans-style jazz.

As a jazz fan, you really have to savor the select moments of the Playboy Jazz Festival, which began its 34th installment Saturday at its longtime home, the Hollywood Bowl. Because as a stand-alone, multi-day barometer of the state of the music, the festival doesn't measure up to internationally known siblings such as Newport or Montreux - not that Playboy even tries (only by the most generous definition could some of the past weekend's acts, like Ozomatli, Sharon Jones and Robin Thicke, ever be considered "jazz")

In an age when Miles Davis still roams the upper half of the jazz charts on iTunes, news of a new band paying tribute to a now-deceased master may not be that surprising. But when Spectrum Road takes the stage to explore the music of Tony Williams' Lifetime while headlining Day 2 of this weekend's Playboy Jazz Festival, listeners would be wise to expect a bit more than the standard repertoire of familiar tunes, familiarly played. "It's hard core," warns Cindy Blackman Santana, a drummer who is stepping into sizable shoes with Spectrum Road.

For the record, 11:50 a.m., June 14 : This item states that the Playboy Jazz Festival takes place on Friday and Saturday. The actual days are Saturday and Sunday, June 16 and 17. A two-day celebration of jazz and the many sounds in its orbit, the 34th annual Playboy Jazz Festival delivers its typical eclectic lineup, headed by jazz heavyweights including the Christian McBride Big Band, the Cookers, Grammy winner Terri Lyne Carrington and...

Like jazz itself, the drummer Lumar LeBlanc was born in the city of New Orleans. And like a lot of musicians there, he played in the traditional brass-band style that originated in the 1920s and '30s, favoring familiar marches and ballads. "Like 'When the Saints Go Marching In' and '(What a) Wonderful World,'" LeBlanc says now. "But being young, we heard things on the radio, like Public Enemy and other rap music. We would sneak in some of these tunes. We found audiences were captivated by these funky beats and these newer sounds … played on a snare drum, a bass drum, a sousaphone, two trumpets, a saxophone and two trombones.