Norman Mailer speaking on Wednesday night at the New York Public Library with the Nobel Prize-winner Günter Grass, said, “This may well be one of the very last times I appear in public; old age is catching up with me.” Still, despite walking with two canes and complaining that he couldn’t hear or see well, Mr. Mailer, 84, was as feisty and funny as ever. He defended Mr. Grass, who has been attacked for what critics say is the belated acknowledgment in his new memoir, “Peeling the Onion,” that he served for a few months in the Waffen-SS as a teenager. Mr. Grass, best known for his novel “The Tin Drum,” has unflinchingly demanded that Germans account for Nazi atrocities. Mr. Mailer said he searched his own life to figure out why Mr. Grass didn’t speak about his experience earlier. “What have I held onto for so long?” he asked, and then answered: stabbing his second wife, Adele, in 1960. “It’s something I’ll probably never write about,” he said. “I’ve never felt ready to write about it...

They're fragments from a time long since past and a faith that endures still. And when they go on tour, they draw rock-concert crowds who want to see pieces of the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible – or Old Testament in Christianity – and other writings that date back more than 2,000 years.

If the San Diego Natural History Museum is right, nearly a half-million visitors will come to Balboa Park over the next six months to see samples of the Dead Sea Scrolls – including, during the second half of the run, a copy of the Ten Commandments.

Some will come for sacred reasons.

“Many people will simply want to sit in the gallery in the presence of these scrolls,” said Risa Levitt Kohn, a San Diego State University professor and curator of the exhibit. “For them, it will be a spiritual experience.”

Others will be drawn by history, the images of how members of a Jewish community, with Roman soldiers advancing upon them in A.D. 68, climbed...

The long-lost manuscript of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearl S. Buck novel “The Good Earth” has been recovered, The Associated Press reported. The typed manuscript vanished from the author’s family farm in Perkasie, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb, around 1966. Jerri Williams, an F.B.I. spokeswoman, said it turned up this month when consigned to a Philadelphia auction house, which notified the authorities. Officials did not say if anyone would face charges related to the manuscript’s disappearance. “The Good Earth,” about life in rural China, helped Buck (1892-1973) become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938.

Mighty Heart tells the story of the hunt in Pakistan for kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through the eyes of his pregnant wife, Mariane, played by Angelina Jolie dipped in caramel. Aside from Jolie—who is very fine, though improbably cast—and a sprinkling of idyllic flashbacks (Daniel gazing into his wife’s eyes, Daniel caressing her swollen belly), the movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a policier, although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly. There’s surprisingly little in the way of politics (the director is the Brit Michael Winterbottom, who’s not known for reticence in that area) and no overarching message—apart from Pearl’s shining example as an investigative journalist. The conclusions we must draw for ourselves.

The most obvious is that in late 2001 and early 2002, we (by which I mean the American media and its consumers) had little idea of the deadly labyrinth into which...

Here's a question that may or may not have an answer, but when Port Washington resident Elyse Luray comes to mind, it almost demands one: How many facts can the human brain absorb?

Facts about wine or "Star Trek" or one-armed baseball players. Facts about slippers, or cowboy spurs, or paintings. Facts about bells, or newspapers (circa 1920). Facts, facts, facts -- there's a world of them out there, and Luray seems to have sponged up all of them.

Some facts about Luray. She's 39, the mother of two boys, Matt and Zach (and, effectively, of one tottering and quite affectionate bulldog named Katie). She lives in a lovely home on a quiet street where ancient oaks and tulip trees hover protectively over other homes. Down the road is the Port Washington Public Library, Luray's unofficial residence. (She also happens to be one of its biggest boosters.)

She is also host of "History Detectives," a fine PBS program that enters its fifth...

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which may well be the most dystopian film ever made. Set in the near future, a mere dozen years from now, in a Los Angeles gone as cold and rainy as 19th-century London, it takes the notion that life is a Darwinian struggle and runs with it, shooting as it goes. Amplifying the dark vision of Philip K. Dick, whose short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? underlies it, Blade Runner ventures that anyone who can afford the trip has abandoned Earth for some distant colony after a catastrophic but undiscussed world war; with a few exceptions, the home planet is now inhabited only by the infirm and the poor—and by a handful of androids slated to die very soon, their life spans limited to four years, and now seeking their maker to ask for a life-extending retooling.

The hero of the book is a bitter bounty hunter named Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. No, that’s not quite right: Deckard is no hero, just...

The National Geographic Society has struck a $1 million deal with the Afghan government to bring a rare cache of gold artifacts to the United States in a traveling exhibition. But some cultural experts who have followed the negotiations are questioning whether Afghanistan is being properly compensated.

Plans call for the ancient Afghan pieces — part of the storied 2,000-year-old Bactrian hoard — to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, although contracts have not yet been signed by those institutions.

The National Geographic Society and the Afghan government signed a protocol accord over the weekend in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, outlining an exhibition schedule that would begin in May 2008 at the National Gallery. The document calls for Afghanistan to receive $1 million as well as 40 percent of “total revenue,” which is defined...

When UBS TMT Vice Chairman Aryeh Bourkoff arrived for the closing night of his documentary, "The Last Jews of Libya," at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 6, the place was so packed he had to give up his seat.

The film, which recounts the last decades of Libya's ancient Sephardic Jewish community through the story of the Roumani family, drew more than 300 that night and about 1,000 over four screenings - quite respectable for a film that started out as a home-made family-history project.

Bourkoff and his mother, Vivienne Roumani-Denn, started the project in 2004 in order to fulfill Bourkoff's passion to preserve the story of their family and that of the now-extinct Libyan Jewish community for Aryeh's children and for generations to come. But Bourkoff is not your ordinary first-time producer - after all, he is vice chairman of technology, media and telecom at UBS - so the amateurish undertaking quickly turned into a professional production.
...

A BRITISH television channel was to broadcast photographs overnight taken at the scene of the crash that killed Princess Diana, in defiance of a plea from her sons not to show them.
The private secretary to Prince William and Prince Harry wrote to Channel 4 saying that they felt the images would be a "gross disrespect" to their mother's memory.

Royal sources indicated that the letter had been written at the instigation of Prince William, who wanted to "take a stand" against intrusions into his mother's dignity.

Politicians waded into the latest row to engulf Channel 4, with the Conservatives calling on the broadcaster to respect the princes' wishes.

But Channel 4 said that it would screen the photos, which show the dying princess receiving medical assistance.