Salon.com > Oprah

Beyoncé and Jay-Z are not going to buy Neverland Ranch

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 10:18:00 +0000

According to a probably very reliable Jackson family source, Jay-Z and Beyoncé may be considering buying Michael Jackson’s shuttered, 2,700-acre Southern California estate.

Except that they're not, according to a very reliable source. Namely, Jay-Z.

While Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's more famous best friends did admit to touring the abandoned Neverland Ranch with Colony Capital owner Thomas Barrack Jr., who manages the estate, Jay-Z responded to rumors of a pending purchase by saying bluntly: “I’ve got no interest in Neverland.”

But still, Jackson family members are letting everyone know that they don't want Jay-Z and Beyoncé to buy the thing that Jay-Z and Beyoncé don't want to buy.

“It is something that we want to keep in the family,” Randy Jackson told the New York Post. “If Barrack took them to the ranch himself... there has got to be something to it,” another family member added.

Cissy Houston will never be a PFLAG parent

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:57:00 +0000

When Whitney Houston first emerged on the music scene in 1985, with her elegant looks (forgive the bow) and her exquisite, powerful voice, her family’s musical legacy was something to celebrate: Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, and Met Opera soprano Leontyne Price were cousins. And Cissy Houston was her mother.

But her family’s legacy would seem tarnished since her death after drowning in a hotel tub, following a drug-induced heart attack (Xanax, marijuana, and cocaine were found in her system), on Feb. 11, 2012 — and not by Whitney. Many of those who've survived her, including her mother, are commodifying their grief by doing so publicly: On Oct. 24, 2012, Lifetime premiered a reality show of the surviving family — “The Houstons”— and last night, Cissy had a sit-down with Oprah to promote her memoir, “Remembering Whitney,” which hits stores today.

And on that sit-down, Oprah gets what she comes for — or at least, this viewer got what she wanted to see — though it took about 20 minutes of warming up her guest. Oprah approaches Cissy cautiously at first, padding Whitney’s mother’s canned, succinct responses about their last encounters, with video footage from the late 1980s of her young daughter talking about how much she loved and treasured her mother, how she owed her everything.

Salon limerick contest

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 14:59:00 +0000

In this week's contest, the NRA, quantum physics, and Lance Armstrong.

The NRA is claiming huge membership increases as well as spike in the sale of assault rifles.

Did we have an assault weapons binge?

Just the thought should make all of us cringe.

Can we trust NRA,

to be honest when they,

Are the voice of a lunatic fringe?

Stephen Whitred
Barriere, B.C., Canada

Teachers with guns? – No thank you.

It’s an idea we need to eschew.

For let’s not forget,

There’d be a new threat;

Teachers can go psycho too.

Mark Tendas
Los Angeles
Quarterbacks come and quarterbacks go.

It ain't rocket science- it's just a big show.

So why shed a tear,

For the life and career,

Of the prayerful Timothy Tebow?

David Lloyd Maron
New York City

Experts still split on what quantum theory means

Experiencing quantum reality

Nick's achieved the impossible feat --

Weaned himself from the classical teat.

Now he knows where it's at,

With Schrödinger's Cat,

But needs help in crossing the street.

Lance Armstrong’s unmoving confession

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Lance Armstrong appeared with Oprah last night, the first part of a two-part confession special, to publicly admit to taking the performance enhancing drugs he has not just denied using, but vehemently, ruthlessly denied using, denigrating and bullying and seeking to destroy the far less powerful people who have told nothing but the truth about his habits. Armstrong picked Oprah to conduct this interview — as opposed to some sports journalist, or Barbara Walters, or Brian Williams or any of the other possible choices — because she alone confers on public screw-ups the sense that just by speaking to her they are beginning the long road back to acceptability. Oprah is a journalist, as she ably demonstrated last night, but she also occupies a particular space, that of celebrity confessor in chief, our national moral proxy, the woman empowered to find her subjects wanting or sufficiently remorseful, the person who accepts tears but not excuses, holds her subjects to the facts and, more important, the feelings. Unfortunately for Lance Armstrong, he does not appear to have enough of those.

Lance Armstrong comes clean

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:02:00 +0000

Lance Armstrong, who last year lost the titles to his seven Tour de France wins over charges related to taking performance enhancing drugs, finally came clean to Oprah in a no-holds-barred interview after years of denial. Watch some of the highlights from the first part of the interview, below:

Armstrong reveals the range of banned substances for 13 years. He says was not possible to win the Tour de France seven times without the drugs:

When Oprah asks, "Why now admit it?" Armstrong responds, "I don't know that I have a great answer," adding, "this is too late." He explains that having "the perfect story" compelled him to maintain the lie:

Why do we keep getting suckered by stories like Manti Te’o?

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:34:00 +0000

When lawyers try cases, they have to deal with burdens of persuasion and standards of proof. For example, when the prosecution attempts to convict someone of a crime, it has the burden of persuasion -- before hearing any evidence the jury is supposed to presume the defendant is innocent -- and the jury is not supposed to convict the defendant unless the prosecution demonstrates the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

I would like to propose the following rule for journalists: When presented with a feel-good story on a sports-related subject, you should presume the story is fabricated, unless persuaded by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

This is just one of the many lessons to be extracted from the increasingly bizarre story of Manti Te’o, the star football player whose heart-rending narrative about the simultaneous death of his grandmother and his girlfriend turned out to have been invented out of whole cyber-cloth.

(Another lesson is that administrators at Notre Dame are far more likely to weep over the imaginary death of a nonexistent girl than they are to shed tears for a real girl who actually committed suicide, after allegedly being sexually assaulted by one of Teo’s teammates.)

Oprah on Armstrong: “He did not come clean in the manner I had expected”

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:32:00 +0000

Cyclist Lance Armstrong, who in October 2012 was stripped of his 7 Tour de France titles after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency charged him for taking performance enhancing drugs, has continued to deny doping--until yesterday. Armstrong opened up about the issue for the first time ever, admitting to Oprah in a 2.5 hour interview that he did, in fact, use performance enhancing drugs while competing.

Descriptions of the interview itself give the impression that Armstrong surrendered during an intense, emotional session with Oprah, who said on "CBS This Morning" that Armstrong "did not come clean in the manner I had expected":

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Rainn Wilson explores “life’s big questions”

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 18:20:00 +0000

Most television viewers identify Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute, the constantly high-strung, testy "Battlestar Galactica" nerd on "The Office." But where his character is cynical and negative in the extreme, in conversation Wilson comes across as effusive, spiritual and upbeat. As the hit sitcom comes to a close in its final season, Wilson is branching out with other projects, many which veer from comedy, but stay close to his greater vision of bringing people together.

Salon recently caught up with the actor and comedian on the phone to discuss “The Office,” his SoulPancake project and his new TV special "Oprah and Rainn Wilson Present SoulPancake" premiering this Sunday on OWN, which focuses on exploring “life’s big questions.” This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Why did you and your friends (Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry) start SoulPancake?

Before the series, our goal was starting a website, called SoulPancake.com. I really wanted to do something positive on the internet. I wanted to try to get young people talking about, thinking about, life’s big questions--make it cool and OK to wonder about the heart, the soul and free will and God and death and big topics like that, big human topics.

Must-see morning clip

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:12:00 +0000

Eighty-four year old "Night" author Elie Wiesel tells Oprah Winfrey that when he won the Nobel Prize, he saw his deceased father in the hall. Though he wanted to join his father on "the other side," Wiesel explains that he had "more things to do," and hasn't "even begun."

Eric Benet: Crooning about love, tweeting about Obama

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:11:00 +0000

Inevitably, questions posed to R&B singer Eric Benet must alight on two words, "sex addict," which is what he said he was when his marriage to Halle Berry was collapsing, and what he has since repeatedly denied being. It's not a surprise that Benet isn't especially interested in having that conversation again. But unless you follow him on Twitter, you might be surprised at what conversations he fervently does want to have: About poverty, race and reproductive rights. And maybe about his idol, Rachel Maddow, and his conceptions of this country's unfinished promise.

"I think America is this beautiful concept," he told Salon, recently. "Well. With revisions."

There is the Eric Benet with a decade and a half of open-shirted croons like "Chocolate Legs" and the recently controversial "Redbone Girl" to his name. There is the Eric Benet of Twitter, who is a red-meat partisan, all bluster as he live-tweets from the left flank ("I love how Joe kept referring to Ryan as 'my friend' when he really meant 'this bitch'" and "How bout a festival 2 celebrate ColumbusDay! Kiddies can dress in costumes n pretend 2 enslave n kill millions of people. FUN!! RT pls!"). And then there is the Eric Benet in person, of milder mettle, who chooses his words carefully.