Today is Saturday, April 7, the 97th day of 2007. There are 268 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On April 7, 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.On this date:In 1927,...

The stylists and makeover mavens of Manhattan are freaking out. They are itching to get their controlling paws on a Park Slope resident named Christine Marinoni. Ms. Marinoni is the New York State campaign director for the Alliance for Quality Education. She is also Cynthia...

Expanding his popularity as a steamy (albeit miniature) screen sex symbol, pint-sized Mexican hunk Gael García Bernal, speaking flawless American English without a trace of an accent, arrives to wreak murderous havoc on born-again Christians in Corpus Christi, Tex., like the snake in Eden. He...

[In the early 1960s, the genre of teen songs had "the boy-friend" as their central theme. The demons of teendom were the other girls. Parents] were another conflicting force. Her parents usually disapproved of Jimmy or Eddie or Johnny, and made vague but forceful class distinctions to keep the lovers apart. Their objections were met with either rebellion or death. Only Janis Ian capitulated in "Society's Child," breaking the mold. (p. 77) Outside of a few songs written by ...

The first thing that struck one about Janis Ian was her youth and the precocity of her talent. (p. 205) It was in 1966, after her dramatic first appearances at Green-wich Village's Village Gate, that Janis made her first album for Verve-Forecast [Janis Ian]. Immediately the record earned the admiration of the educated public, but also the disapproval of the Establishment. This was due to the most noticed song on the album, "Society's Child," which tackled the problem of racial di...

Janis Ian is for the trendies one of the most exciting, red-hot writer/performers in pop at the moment; for the rest of us she's definitely here to stay. With "Miracle Row,"… she has seized for herself the title of Girl Most Likely to Get Pop off Its Moribund Ass in the Late Seventies. Like the lady herself, "Miracle Row" exudes theatricality. It has equal amounts of the high romance of the low life and the jaded, dark-red-nail-polish lows that accompany the high li...