When George Adams lost his job at an Ohio tile factory last October, the most practical thing he did, he thinks, was go to a new church, even though he had to move his wife and four preteen boys to Conroe, a suburb of Houston, to do it. Conroe, you see, is not far from Lakewood, the home church of megapastor and best-selling author Joel Osteen.
Osteen’s relentlessly upbeat television sermons had helped Adams, 49, get through the hard times, and now Adams was expecting the smiling, Texas-twanged 43-year-old to help boost him back toward success. Read More...
On Monday night, Drake released the video for “Hotline Bling,” his single currently at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, via Apple Music. After a nod to the actual hotline referenced in the title, the bulk of the video’s five minutes features Drake, bathed in candy-colored light, dancing against a stark background.
Come Tuesday morning, the rapper-slash-singer’s dancing—which, according to Internet consensus, may be justly described as goofy—had inspired a vast assortment of memes, setting his moves to songs that might seem incongruous if not for their surprisingly fitting beats. Read More...
For centuries, caste-bound Britain regarded higher learning as a rite of the rich and a privilege of the few. Even by 1945, only one-tenth of 1% of the population attended universities—mainly the well born, who “went up” to Oxford and Cambridge and on to the “Establishment” that runs English culture and politics. But in 1948 came a dramatic change: for any poor youngster with a rich mind, Britain’s welfare state promised a free university education through a vast system of scholarships. Read More...
