Karen Carpenter

Not long after two men died last month at a Hempstead Village "sober home," New York's top substance abuse official contacted the leader of Oxford House, the nation's largest administrator of group housing for recovering addicts. "I talked with him about...

It's not even Christmas yet, and I've already gained 5 pounds, most of it on my face (see dotted sketch). Five pounds doesn't sound like a lot, unless it's all in your jowls. Besides, I have been gaining 5 pounds every Christmas for about 20 years now,...

"Thriller," the biggest-selling album ever, wasn't the only Michael Jackson work released in November 1982. A few weeks before it was set to hit stores, MCA Records released an album of Jackson reading the story of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and...

*Brazil's "Elite Squad" took top honors at the Berlin film fest amid a busy weekend for awards. In Los Angeles, art directors honored "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men" (also the Cinema Audio Society fave) and camera operators honored...

It was hustle and flow, all right. Terrence Howard, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for his role as Djay, the rapping pimp protagonist of Craig Brewer's acclaimed 2005 film, was doing everything but serving smoked Gouda to the 40 or so people...

Marie Black is a skeletal woman of 106 years with skin so thin that a nurse's touch can leave a dark bruise on her arm. She never leaves her bed in Westminster Towers' nursing home in Orlando. Sitting up is painful. Her eyesight is gone, blinded by...

It makes sense that Todd Haynes rolls his own cigarettes. All of the writer-director's films have the same feel of careful personal construction, handcrafted and singular and the work perhaps of a slight control freak. With a background in semiotics – the...

First, he was folk music's Second Coming, a young man with a storied past that tied him to Woody Guthrie's legacy. He was the ambitious social striver, dating his way into folk-music royalty by taking up with older folk superstar Joan Baez. Then Bob...

It might be a 1969 telegram to Australia from a label president unaccustomed to working with openly out-of-control rockers, asking about Joe Cocker's "deportment." Or a letter from a fan irritated that it was not possible, in 1966, to buy tickets in New...

What a relief. Ghost Rider is a joke -- a monumentally foolish comic book movie with lots of unintentional laughs, mixed in with the intentional ones. Absurd, ineptly plotted, it lacks a coherent theme or storyline or reason to exist aside from a very...

On a Thursday morning in March, about 20 women sit in a recreation room at The Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, passing around a basket of stones engraved with inspirational words such as hope, balance and change. At this meeting, known as "community,"...

In the end, Burt Bacharach didn't need B.J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield to tap the poignancy of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." The 72-year-old composer sang it himself, in a thin voice straining for the high notes, transforming...