Rachel

Howard Cohen has received dozens of calls from "Rachel" at "card member services. " At first he thought they must be from his credit card issuer. Now he knows better. "It's a scam," Cohen, 67, of Fontana told me. "All they want is to get you into some new credit card with a higher interest rate - or worse. " The "worse" in this case is possibly having your identity stolen and bogus charges run up on your plastic. The Web is dripping with complaints from consumers nationwide about the "Rachel" calls.

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books, novelists Marisa Silver (“Mary Coin”) and Rachel Kushner (“The Flamethrowers”) sat down to speak with book critic David Ulin. Silver and Kushner are good friends, and they talked about being “writing buddies” as well as the influence of living in the West on their writing life. Silver's new novel, “Mary Coin,” imagines the life of a woman, living in a California coastal valley town during the Great Depression, who was immortalized in a famous Dorothea Lange photo of a migrant farmworker's  family.

The only landmark for about 40 miles on a barren stretch of highway is a mailbox battered by time and desert gusts. It's known as the Black Mailbox, though it's actually a faded white. Over the years, hundreds of people have converged here in south-central Nevada to photograph the box -- the size of a small television, held up by a chipped metal pole. They camp next to it. They try to break into it. They debate its significance, or simply huddle by it for hours, staring into the night.

A few weeks ago, I visited Rachel Kushner in her Angelino Heights home to talk about her second novel, “The Flamethrowers.” Taking place in lower Manhattan and Italy in the late 1970s, “The Flamethrowers” is an inquiry into art, politics and identity, set against a pair of landscapes defined by turmoil. Kushner is smart and deeply thoughtful; her reflections on the book, and the issues it raises, appear in this Sunday's Arts & Books . Here is more of our conversation.

After doctors told Jeanie Flowers that her 3-month-old daughter, Rachel, was blind, the new mom had to learn how to help the girl cope with her condition. It didn't happen. At 13, Rachel still didn't know how to brush her teeth, get dressed or tie her shoe laces. Flowers, instead, bought her Velcro shoes, fed her and did most simple tasks for her. "Living with a blind kid, sometimes it's so much easier to do things for them and to expedite things," she said.

The very name of the group Rachel's seems to suggest an unresolved thought or story. And so does the Louisville ensemble's music, stitching modern tonal classical styles with subtle, rock-distilled tension and well-integrated found-sound recordings into haunting compositions that seem like hints rather than complete statements. Thursday at the Echo, the quintet highlighted pieces from its fifth album, "Systems/Layers," a new collaboration with New York's experimental SITI theater company.

"RACHEL Getting Married," a new movie from director Jonathan Demme and starring Anne Hathaway, opened this month and quickly became a surprise hit. In the film, Hathaway plays a recovering drug addict who's released from rehab to join her sister's raucous Connecticut wedding. Another surprise came for screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet, who didn't foresee tapping into a widespread obsession with loading the dishwasher. A crucial scene in "Rachel" involves a dishwasher-loading contest, in which the father of the bride and the bridegroom battle against the clock to discover who has the better dishwasher-loading moves.

When the Weinstein Co. announced a year and a half ago that it was moving "Project Runway" from Bravo to Lifetime, it did more than tick off the good folks at NBC; it sent tremors of fear through the fan base. As the original January premiere date for Season 6 came and went, with Bravo parent company NBC Universal and the Weinstein Co. duking it out in court, devotees were not only jonesing, they were worried. What would the move to Lifetime mean? A kinder, gentler Heidi Klum sending off eliminated contestants with a murmured "Ciao" instead of the clipped "Auf Wiedersehen"?

Though unevenly told and at times too fanciful for its own good, "Electrick Children" marks an intriguing feature debut for its risk-taking writer-director, Rebecca Thomas. Thomas apparently drew on her own upbringing to craft this 1996-set tale of 15-year-old Rachel (Julia Garner, excellent), a fundamentalist Utah Mormon who believes she's become pregnant by secretly listening to an old cover recording of Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone" sung by a stirring male voice. To avoid a face-saving marriage arranged by her religious leader father (a nicely calibrated Billy Zane)

Here's the central conundrum in the new romantic comedy "Something Borrowed": Does the pop-off-the-page pretty of Kate Hudson's Darcy give her automatic rights to hunky Dex (Colin Egglesfield)? Or does the less shiny but still pretty penny that is Ginnifer Goodwin's good girl Rachel deserve a shot at the ring, even if that ring's already on her best friend's finger? Before we get to the answer, let me bring up the central problem in "Something Borrowed" — a Grand Central Station of problems.

Rachel Kushner's house in Angelino Heights feels about a million miles - and a million years - from the tumult embodied in her novels. There are books on shelves and stacks of children's games; in one corner, a music stand holds a beginner's songbook for guitar. And yet, even on a quiet afternoon in early spring, one finds traces, echoes of the broader world. Perhaps most prominent is the large framed map of Cuba, the setting for Kushner's first book, "Telex from Cuba," a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

Hollywood power couple Daniel Craig (a.k.a. James Bond) and Rachel Weisz (most recently in "Oz: The Great and Powerful") are to head to Broadway in the fall, costarring as husband and wife in Harold Pinter's "Betrayal. " Tony Award winner Mike Nichols is to direct the revival and Scott Rudin will produce, Rudin's office announced Friday. The production marks Craig's return to Broadway after the hugely successful "A Steady Rain," which costarred Hugh Jackman, in 2009. The Pinter play will be Weisz's Broadway debut, though she's no stranger to theater.

NEW YORK - Above all else, Rachel Robinson remembers the kissing. When the taunts at the ballpark grew too fierce and the naysayers too loud, her husband, Jackie, would come home to their Brooklyn apartment and the couple would try to block out the world. "So many people are curious about how we were at home, thinking that we brought all the anger and chaos in there with us," Rachel Robinson, 90, said last week as she perched behind a desk at the gleaming offices of the education foundation she runs in lower Manhattan.

Some fine actors have contracted to appear in "How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)," a multi-generational family comedy premiering Wednesday night on ABC. It should do their careers no lasting harm. It is the sort of neither-here-nor-there sitcom that can make me feel faintly sad for the form, and by extension for the health of the nation, and yet it is no worse than so many others that come and go and sometimes, to my surprise, come and stay. If it can only stop pawing at your leg and licking your face for a moment, it may settle down into something you would allow in the house.

Rachel Bilson is almost as well-known for her sense of style as she is for her acting career, so what does she advise women to wear on dates? Something short and tight, she tells Cosmopolitan in the May issue, because men are so visual. On the cover she wears a short (but not tight), flirty pink dress. [Cosmopolitan] [For the record, April 1, 11:53 a.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Rachel Bilson made comments in the April Cosmopolitan issue. ]

Rachel Bilson is opening up about her relationship with her on-and-off boyfriend of six years, Hayden Christensen. "I'm a really good girlfriend -- I always put all that first in my life," the "Hart of Dixie" actress and May cover girl tells the mag. "I'm definitely the person who would make him his favorite dinner to come home to. " She and Christensen met on the set of their time-traveling flick "Jumper" in 2007. They announced their engagement in February 2009 but called off the nuptials in 2010, citing the pitfalls of long-distance relationships.

Charlie Haden concert: An item in the Happening Today column in Tuesday's Calendar on Charlie Haden's concert at Disney Hall said the bassist was performing with his sisters Tanya, Rachel and Petra. Haden performed with his daughters Tanya, Rachel and Petra.

Kathryn Hahn is a familiar face from her supporting roles in such films as “How Do You Know,” “Revolutionary Road” and “Anchorman” and TV shows “Parks and Recreation,” “Girls” and “Hung.” Now, the 38-year-old actress is getting her first leading role in a feature film with “Afternoon Delight,” a dramatic comedy premiering Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. “Delight” is somewhat akin to a contemporary creative class retelling of “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” In the film, Hahn plays Rachel, a married mother of one who is suffering from a certain upscale ennui.

Monday night marked the beginning of Passover. Families around the world gathered to celebrate the holiday and discuss why this night is different from any other night. Celebrities took to Twitter and Instagram to share their well wishes and post pictures of their celebrations. Here is a look at the highlights: Drake, known as @champagnpapi on Instagram, posted a picture of his family Seder with the captions "Talking matzah and plagues...Happy Passover. " There were no snide remarks from E!

Shepard Smith, longtime host of the nightly "Fox Report," is Fox News Channel's No. 1 anchor. That's thanks in part to his mix of folksy accessibility and anchor-worthy gravitas, which have earned him a perch at Politico.com, where his news clips are regularly featured in a regular column, the Daily Shep. So you were on smoke watch in Rome. How did Fox News cover the papal conclave and what was that scene like? Well, I did it in '05, and it was different because it began in a mourning phase [for Pope John Paul II]