Spite

Eleven-year-old Angela Davis Brown must learn to face life after her mother abandons the family for the lights and glamour of Hollywood in "When Did You Stop Loving Me," the first novel by journalist and memoirist Veronica Chambers ("Mama's Girl"). Left in the solo care of her bewildered father, Teddo, a magician who's scraping by gig-to-gig in Brooklyn, Angela hardly knows what to make of her mother, Melanie, walking out the door one nondescript 1979 day and never coming back.

Zach BRAFF wanted to be a filmmaker long before he garnered fame and acclaim for his role on the popular sitcom "Scrubs." His debut as writer and director, "Garden State," in which he also stars alongside Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm, takes place during a few days in which a young man returns home for his mother's funeral.

Each year, along about now, everyone else's life starts to look a lot more appealing than my own. The whole world seems to belong to a secret society whose motto is, "Aren't We All So Happy and Well-Adjusted and Aren't You Not!" Everyone's life, in other words, looks like a Norman Rockwell painting, beautifully framed -- except my own, which seems to bear more resemblance to a densely skewed Jackson Pollock drawing on see-through paper, hung up with a thumbtack.

Gov. Gray Davis has made more than 20 appointments to courts and state boards since losing the recall election and intends to continue filling vacancies before handing over power to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, administration officials said Tuesday. Davis acted despite suggestions by Schwarzenegger and other Republicans that the Democratic governor stop naming people to state jobs.

The Justice Department has been asked to investigate whether the Bush administration retaliated against a critic of its Iraq policy by leaking the name of his wife, an undercover CIA operative, to journalists, a top administration official said Sunday. The allegation stems from a report in July by syndicated columnist Robert Novak that identified Valerie Plame as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction for the CIA. Novak cited "two senior administration officials" as his sources.

Leave it to the Galaxy to cure Kansas City's ills and add another chink to its own quickly tarnishing MLS Cup. A 2-1 loss to a reeling club tends to do such things. Before Saturday's match, the visiting Wizards had not won in more than two months, going a combined 0-8-2 in their previous 10 games, including the U.S. Open Cup, while getting outscored by an aggregate 17-6.

Ken Byrtus isn't a typical traveler. He doesn't mind paying hundreds of dollars to fill up his tank. An entrepreneur who owns motels and RV parks in California and Oregon, he recently spent $1.3 million on a brand-new Marathon Coach.

The lives of Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy are part of the dramatic back story of American political and intellectual thought of the 20th century. Although they are now posed historically as sworn enemies because of the lawsuit at the end of their lives, they had much in common. Both were self-made women who juggled intense and demanding careers with Big Personal Lives.

WASHINGTON -- A weary Congress is trudging to the exits knee-deep in unfinished business, ranging from homeland security to health legislation, with partisan tensions almost as taut as when the session began after the disputed 2000 presidential election. But what may be more remarkable -- and easily obscured by the mountain of stalled bills -- is how much far-reaching legislation this divided Congress managed to produce, almost in spite of itself.

Steve Martin gazed out at the Hollywood crowd as he hosted last year's Oscars and tried to surmise what the vast television audience must be thinking: "They're all gay," he said. Yet for all the jokes about the entertainment industry embracing--or, in the eyes of religious conservatives, promoting--the cause of gays and lesbians, this year's prime-time lineup will actually witness a sharp decline in the number of regular or recurring gay, lesbian and transgender characters.