Sharon Waxman

This is what it looks like from inside the working world of Hollywood, now a strike zone. The screeching sound you hear is the shut-down of show after show, from Santa Monica to Burbank to Rockefeller Center. That is the sound of the brakes applied to a multibillion dollar entertainment industry. Here is one partial…

At the PEN USA awards last night in Beverly Hills, it was no surprise to hear a lot of talk about the Hollywood writer’s strike. The theme was the First Amendment (isn’t PEN’s theme always the First Amendment?), and some made strained — even angry — comparisons between the screenwriters’ standoff over money, and the…

Who’s next? Why, the dealers are next. Jerome Eisenberg, the long-time and much in-the-mix antiquities dealer, has given Italy eight pieces of art valued at about a half-million dollars, according to reports today. (See AP and Bloomberg .) Eisenberg, now 77, has claimed to be doing so "for ethics and good will," but we may…

Every year I look forward to attending the "Courage in Journalism" awards, given annually to a few women who demonstrate true fearlessness in the pursuit of truth. The event is a lesson in humility and a reminder of what price some journalists pay for their ideals. This year’s ceremony, held last night at the Beverly…

Find today’s program here: https://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/pc/pc071030surveillance_vs_priv

Friends and Readers:  Hope you will tune in tomorrow, 2:30 pm PST, Tuesday, October 30, as I guest-host "The Politics of Culture" on KCRW for the first (and, depending, very possibly the last) time. You can listen live at 89.9 FM if you are in Los Angeles, or hear it online at KCRW.com, and it’s…

It was bound to come to this: ancient body parts held hostage by a French bureaucracy fearful of creating a precedent. That’s the truth behind a strange tale playing out in France this week. The mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior was what an enlightened deputy mayor in Rouen decided was not a work…

A major break-through has occurred for Egypt in its quest to reclaim five major pieces from five major Western museums. The Hildesheim Museum in Germany has agreed to lend Egypt the statue of the architect of the Great Pyramid in time for the opening of Cairo’s new Grand Museum in 2012, Egypt has confirmed today.…

Sexy, isn’t it? It’s the Magna Carta, one of apparently 20 known original copies of a charter issued  in 1215 that set us — yes, us, we the lotus eaters who bask in the land of the free and the home of the brave — on the path to individual rights separate and apart from…

It takes a lot to interrupt my writing silence, but today’s article by Kim Murphy in the L.A. Times makes it necessary. Kim managed to gain access to the basement of Iran’s contemporary art museum where, she informs us, the most important collection of impressionist and modern Western art outside the West is stored, though…

This picture ran in today’s International Herald Tribune and many other newspapers, and it moved me deeply. It shows the great-nephew of Jean-Marie Lustiger, the esteemed Archbishop of Paris, placing dirt from Israel on the coffin of the archbishop, in front of Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral where he was later laid to rest.…

As I reported here over a week ago, Marion True’s woes are about to subside, because of the agreement between Italy and the Getty for the museum to return 40 objects that Italy says were looted. Bloomberg News reports today that both Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli and state prosecutor Maurizio Fiorilli say that the civil…

This is kind of cool. Someone called Marshal Zeringue is hosting a blog that encourages reading, in part by asking writers what they are looking at these days. So, he asked me, and I answered. It’s here: http://whatarewritersreading.blogspot.com/2007/08/sharon-waxman.html, and the rest of blog is pretty interesting too. Marshal writes, as I guess he does regularly…