Word: goddesses
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Diva means goddess. All right, the word is as goofily overblown for a female vocal star as "artist" is for any punk with a record contract. But as a job description, "diva" carries certain burdens. One must not only sing one's heart out; one must expose it to the harshest elements. What becomes a legend most? Suffering. A childhood of deprivation; liaisons with powerful, possibly dangerous men; career triumph soured by personal despair. A life of melodrama makes the diva more human, thus more godlike, to her fans. A catchy moniker helps: Callas...Garland...Lady Day...Whitney. The singer...
...Carolyn's killers planned to pray to another Hindu deity that November night, the fearsome Kali, goddess of destruction. A dilapidated temple devoted to Kali lies a few hundred meters from where Carolyn was strangled, just beyond her grave, which was finally discovered by police a few weeks ago after a tip-off. There, in a lean-to fashioned from a corrugated-iron roof and four wooden posts, the only decoration a single spear stuck into the raw earth, Shanmugavela and the three other killers conducted a gruesome set of rites upon Carolyn's corpse, an otherworldly ceremony they believed...
...Even if Shanmugavela did exploit the gullibility of the outsiders, some part of him must have been in thrall to the goddess's dark power. After making the offering, police sources say, Shanmugavela fell into a trance in the makeshift Kali temple and intoned a four-digit sequence, these numbers the twisted legacy of a woman's life. Michael drove straight to a betting shop and put down a few hundred dollars, carefully repeating the sequence. The numbers were, of course, losers. Had they been the winning numbers, would the sacrifice of Carolyn's life have been any less...
...That psychology plays out almost to the letter on one of the most visible pro-anorexia sites (or "pro-ana," as devotees call them), known as "My Goddess Ana." Accused in the press of perpetuating a deadly disease, the site?s 20-year-old creator offers this reply. "The opening page of the site clearly stipulates that the content of the site is Pro-Anorexic and should not be viewed by those who are in recovery or are thinking about recovery, or who, indeed, do not suffer from an ED. If you are reading this as an objector...
...better sort of world, a book like Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations (Vintage; 285 pages) wouldn't exist. For a start, it would have been a completed book: author John Diamond, a popular Times columnist and the husband of the TV culinary goddess Nigella Lawson, died of cancer in March after writing just six chapters of an "uncomplimentary view of complementary medicine." That unfinished text - cut off, spookily, almost in midthought - is rounded out by an anthology of Diamond's newspaper columns, which show off his first-class deadline wit. (A story about being forced by his Hassidic computer repairman...