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Stop us if you've heard this one before... According to Page Six The Magazine, some Manhattan parents are so desperate to give their children a leg-up on their peers, they're sending them to Mandarin classes! (And Hindi! And French! And German!)

Page Six's Jennifer Rose quotes a parent named Brett Hauser, who pays $395 for his 6-month-old son to take 10 sessions at The Language Workshop for Children saying, "Mandarin is the language of our future. With China poised to become the world's leading economy sometime this century, I'm doing the only responsible thing. It's like reading to your kid or making sure he gets all the right foods. I'm helping him prepare for his future. Thirty years from now these kids are going to be translating for all of us."

The magazine calls this phenomenon "NYC's New Baby Talkers."

Talkers, yes; new, no.  read more »

Monday: Inside the Actor's Studio

Like most everyone else, we're iffy on James Lipton, who hosts Inside the Actor's Studio. Or maybe we're just jealous, because he has the best job in the world. Either way, we'll be recording tonight when he talks to comedian Dave Chappelle for the show's 200th episode.  Or rather, Mr. Chappelle talks to Mr. Lipton. In celebration of the big anniversary, the tables will turn for the night, with hosted being hosted. Count on loads of best off clips, and copious cackles from our favorite comedian. [Bravo, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: Opening Night

Two years ago, we caught a screening of Opening Night at BAM that also featured a short talk with Gena Rowlands, who stars in the film and was married to its director, John Cassavetes.  read more »

“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.  read more »

In case you missed it, here (courtesy of Em Whitney) is a bit of Michael Bloomberg's Friday interview with the BBC in which he explains his opinion that the long Democratic primary is bad for John McCain:

Although journalists on this side of the Atlantic have more or less stopped asking the question, Michael Bloomberg was once again pressed for his position on presidential politics during an interview with BBC Newsnight last Friday.  read more »

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It was 1993 when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was honored as the best novel to have ever won theMan Booker Prize for Fiction in the prestigious literary accolade’s 25-year history. Now, Booker has announced it will present a second one-off award, “The Best of the Booker,” to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the BBC reports. A panel of judges will select six eligible books before handing the final decision over to the public, which can vote for their favorite novel via the Booker’s Web site starting in May. Each year since 1969, the Booker Prize has rewarded what it deems the year’s best novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland -- in addition to the acclaim and a boost in book sales, the winner also receives 50,000 GBP. Last year, the honor went to Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering, and in 2006, it went to Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss. Both authors have been able to embark on worldwide book tours as a result.

Sad news for Doctor Who fans. The British sci-fi show's first producer, Verity Lambert, an influential and respected force in scripted television in the UK, passed away last night at the age of 71.

"Lambert was also the BBC's only female producer in 1963 when she worked on the time-travel drama that grew to become one of the UK's most popular TV shows," reports The Guardian. "She died last night following a long illness, but was 'working right up until the end', according to the BBC."

According to Guardian Unlimited, the BBC has postponed for a few more weeks their plans to start mining their ranks in search of 1800 redundancies.

"Bectu, the National Union of Journalists and Unite had threatened to ballot their members from this afternoon if the BBC went ahead with an immediate call for redundancies from today," reported The Guardian's website.

"In a letter to unions this morning, the BBC said it still planned to press on with the plan, but would wait two weeks to give it time to hold talks with them," the report added.