NEW YORK — Last fall, Hank Paulson entered an HBO conference room to meet his match: William Hurt. “The initial meeting was a good meeting,” Hurt recalled of the session between the former Treasury secretary and the actor assigned to play him in “ Too Big to Fail ,” a televised retelling of the 2008 financial crisis. The stakes of the Hurt-Paulson confab were high, and each man was sizing up the other. Hurt didn’t want to be rolled, and Paulson didn’t want his image debased. Read full article > >

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HBO’s ‘Too Big to Fail’ and the politics of portrayal

As I flick through television channels, looking at the video images of Osama bin Laden, I do not only see what the United States government wants me to see: a vain, graying, diminished man obsessed with perceptions of his image (after all, I learn from news reports, he appears to have dyed his beard).

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Opinion: Will videos bolster bin Laden?

Marc-Andre Hamelin is one of the smartest pianists playing today. If this description conjures up the image of a pedantic professorial type, think again: Hamelin has established himself as the thinking man’s virtuoso, and virtuosity is his main hallmark. He just employs it a lot more interestingly than most.

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Music review: Marc-Andre Hamelin at Strathmore

Abduction We’ve waited long enough to catch a glimpse of what Taylor Lautner will be up to following his time in the Twilight franchise, but I’m happy to announce the wait is now over. The first trailer for Lautner’s upcoming action film Abduction has arrived online, complete with action, suspense, and your obligatory Lautner make-out session … because, ya know, he’s dangerous and sexy.

Abduction We’ve waited long enough to catch a glimpse of what Taylor Lautner will be up to following his time in the Twilight franchise, but I’m happy to announce the wait is now over. The first trailer for Lautner’s upcoming action film Abduction has arrived online, complete with action, suspense, and your obligatory Lautner make-out session … because, ya know, he’s dangerous and sexy.

We are born explorers. A land-locked human will find any way to explore their surroundings. First by learning how to climb trees, descend into caves, scale mountains. That not being enough, we build boats to explore the rivers and seas, airplanes to soar into the sky, submarines to explore the depths of the oceans, and drills to bore deep into the earth. When that wasn’t sufficient, we began to reach for the stars. Yuri Gagarin took that first step, making a single orbit around the Earth on April 12, 1961. He of course became an instant celebrity and was honored with a multitude of accolades — including his image on a 100 ruble coin. Alan Shepard was the second man in space, and was afforded full hero status in the United States. But what about the third man in space? Have you ever heard of Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov? Although certainly a great man, he’s unlikely to be popping up as the answer to a quiz show million dollar question. While he had the distinction of being the first man to sleep in orbit, making it into space just wasn’t the same the third time around. Why? Because the first time you set foot on a new land it’s exploration. The second time you set foot on that same land it’s tourism. We need that buzz of excitement that comes from exploring something new. During the moon landing in July 1969 that was so dramatically televised throughout the world, who didn’t imagine themselves in the shoes of Neil Armstrong? For that fleeting moment we all wanted to be there. But four months later we had landed again — this time as tourists. It was undoubtedly an incredible mission filled with great science, but it couldn’t capture the same sense of excitement of Armstrong’s landing in the mind of the public. And just getting there isn’t enough. To be an explorer, you have to move. Poke around. Look under a rock. Climb a mountain. When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 after a five-week voyage, he didn’t stop and spend the rest of his time drawing pictures of the beach. He dove in. He explored. He sailed to other islands. He didn’t take photographs from 200,000 feet up. He dug through the bushes like we all did when we were kids. He got his clothes dirty and probably broke a bone or two. Don’t get me wrong — orbiting a distant planet and taking millions of photos from space is good science. But it isn’t really exploration. Thankfully, as technology improves our ability to act as true explorers without risking the lives of actual humans increases. NASA’s intrepid Mars rovers are excellent examples of this. Spirit and Opportunity were true explorers, and we were riveted to their journey. These robots drove around, drilled rocks and careened through craters. These were robots willing to get dirty. Dust storms? Rocks blocking the path? Bring it! Opportunity drove down the edge of Victoria crater and struggled to get back up to the rim. She found the first meteorite on another planet. Spirit’s wheel spun in the sand and we worried about her. She never got out, but she had a good five years on Mars — throwing herself headlong into a hostile and treacherous environment. Why did the world pay so much more attention to these plucky rovers than the Viking missions to Mars? Because Spirit and Opportunity were explorers. We’ve all been stuck in the snow or had a flat tire interrupt our travels. And when Spirit and Opportunity encountered similar troubles we empathize in a way that we can’t with a Viking craft that just sat there on the surface. The next rover set to head to Mars, Curiosity, already has 29,000 Twitter followers and 4,700 Facebook fans. I’m betting she will have plenty of adventures to report back. So what is in store for us fifty years from now? Plenty of good science, sure. But the kid inside me is hoping for more exploration. Let’s get a craft to splash through a coronal mass ejection. Let’s drill through the ice of Europa and swim through the waters below. Let’s cut an asteroid in half. Let’s sail a submarine through the liquid surface of Jupiter. For the next 50 years, let’s not forget that kid inside all of us. The one that didn’t mind getting an occasional bruise or scrape. I’m sure Yuri wouldn’t want it any other way.

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The Difference Between Exploring and Tourism

PENDLETON, Ore. — A cowboy grasping the reins of a bucking bronco has long been the image of this farm and ranch town. It’s the emblem of the annual Pendleton Round-Up, a celebration of the city’s colorful past, when pioneers on the Oregon Trail settled the prairie.

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Ore. city offers incentives for solar energy installation

Breaking: Gender stereotypes persist on the Internet. Women use Facebook to deal with their image and self-esteem issues, according to a study released yesterday. Traditionally, men base their self worth on competition and achievement, whereas women focus on appearance. Riffing on these norms, University at Buffalo professor Michael Stefanone wondered if Internet behaviors matched these standards: Does social media usage reflect the female obsession with self-image? To determine social media behaviors based on gender, the study had 311 participants fill out a questionnaire measuring their contingencies of self worth. It also asked of their typical behaviors on Facebook. Not only did the study show that women identify more strongly with their image and appearance, but it suggested that they use Facebook to express this association. The study found that women who sought approval based on how others’ saw them had a much more active social media presence. Specifically, they post a lot more photos of themselves on Facebook. From these findings, Stefanone asserts that women perform this behavior to compete for attention with each other: It is disappointing to me that in the year 2011 so many young women continue to assert their self worth via their physical appearance — in this case, by posting photos of themselves on Facebook as a form of advertisement. As a woman who has both high self-esteem and likes posting Facebook photos, my behavior has nothing to do with lady competition — I just enjoy recording and sharing memories with my network. But, hey, maybe I’m not the norm.

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Study: Women Post More Facebook Photos to Raise Self-Esteem

Writer and director Tyler Perry is the big winner at this year’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Image Awards.

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Tyler Perry wins at NAACP awards

See how five of our favorite creatives celebrate the sappiest holiday of the year While some bitterly cast off the romantic holiday as nothing more than an excuse to consume, Valentine’s Day is a great way to remind people how special they are. We tapped some of our favorite creatives to see how they make the holiday unique. Artist Dodi Wexler has been making and sending valentines since she was 19-years-old, starting with 10 and now crafting more than 200 each year. Wexler explains “I started making the Valentines because I always was so saddened that I never had a secret admirer or anyone amazing asking me to be their valentine on Valentine’s Day. As I made them, I got so wrapped up in the production and sending them to people, that I forgot about being sad. The giving made me really happy, especially because I know how much of a bummer Valentine’s Day can be.” She also sees the creative merit in her venture, saying “They are a great way to discover new materials and try out new techniques in a doodle without the pressure of a meaningful piece lurking over my shoulder.” Jesse Levison spends much of her time silkscreen printing cards for Gold Teeth Brooklyn , a line she runs with her friend Emily Joiner. When we asked what she had up her sleeve this holiday, Levison replied with the “damn crafty” gift she received from her boyfriend Alex, a welder at furniture design studio Uhuru . The sculpture consists of a metal box, which houses a fold-up metal heart etched with a personal message. Capturing the spirit of the holiday in ink, Vanessa Prager eschewed her eerie tendencies in favor of a more romantic theme, one that channels her playful and thoughtful personality. The classic card (the image above right is the inside message) serves as both a personal greeting and a keepsake for years to come. Graphic designer Matt Van Ekeren teamed up with Italian illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli to create a charming animation for Valentine’s Day. “Let Love Grow” is a simple way to show that special someone you care. A psychologist and artist “who sometimes suffers insomnia,” Ilana Simons began crafting clay creatures to keep her company at night. For Valentine’s Day she put her late-night hobby to use, filling an empty chocolate box with little characters for her boyfriend to help him with “fighting a chocolate addiction.”

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Handmade Valentines

There is a great deal of anti-Semitism in the world. And then there’s the cover of the Washington City Paper, which features a photograph of Washington Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder (who is, in my city, widely understood to be an egregious putz) on which devil’s horns and an comic-book evil-dude mustache are drawn. It’s pretty funny, and it accompanies a great article by the sportswriter Dave McKenna on Snyder’s too-numerous-to-count failings as an owner. Snyder, unable to bear an attack by the mighty Washington City Paper, has decided to sue, and even more stupidly, he has enlisted the Simon Wiesenthal Center in his campaign. The Wiesenthal Center, unbelievably, is now accusing the CIty Paper of trafficking in Nazi imagery! Tablet’s Marc Tracy reports that the Center is demanding that the City Paper “apologize for the image,  which, it accused, is ‘associated with virulent anti-Semitism going back to the Middle Ages, deployed by the genocidal Nazi regime, by Soviet propagandists, and even in 2011 by those who still seek to demonize Jews.’” Tracy goes on to write, “So, to be clear: WCP at most implicitly trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes–a breathtakingly dumb allegation, but that is the Center’s allegation; the Center, by contrast, explicitly–not allegedly, but indisputably–associated a small alternative newspaper with ‘the genocidal Nazi regime.’ Nice.” This is almost unbearably stupid. The image isn’t anti-Semtiic, at least not to anyone who has ever gone to grade school and/or has scrawled on a magazine. Why the Wiesenthal Center would take on the ridiculous Daniel Snyder as a client is unfathomable. Unless it’s not. So far, at least, his name does not appear on the Wiesenthal’s board of directors.

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Oh, Cut the Crap, Simon Wiesenthal Center!

As what promises to be a crippling winter snowstorm moves across the United States, threatening areas from New Mexico to New England, NASA captured this photograph using GOES-13, one of a series of satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Heavy snow is expected today in portions of northern Iowa, southern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Snowfall from the system extends from Michigan west to Montana, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. A mix of rain and snow also stretches into the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, and it is all moving east,” NASA explained , covering most of the American heartland. “This system appears to be as large as 1/3rd of the Continental U.S.” Click on the image above for a larger version. Image: NOAA/NASA GOES Project.

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Orbital View: Crippling Snowstorm Moves Across the U.S.

Captured using La Silla Observatory’s MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope outfitted with a Wide Field Imager camera, this image of the Orion Nebula is actually a composite of five different exposures. With each exposure taken for 52 minutes through a different filter, the nebula – you’ve probably seen a less radiant version of it numerous times as it’s clearly visible to the naked eye, sitting just below Orion’s famous belt — seems to pulse with different colors. Red shows glowing hydrogen gas and ultraviolet light has been tinted purple. Located about 1,350 light years from us here on Earth, the Orion Nebula is a huge structure. To give you a sense of its size, note that our familiar moon would fit comfortably inside of this image. View more Pictures of the Day . Image: European Southern Observatory.

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Picture of the Day: The Orion Nebula

In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, they premiere a whole bunch of photos from upcoming 2011 films, including The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and Captain America: The First Avenger, among others. The magazine hasn’t put these images online yet (though we expect them to soon), but in the meantime it seems fans have scanned in images for us to check out ahead of time. First up is this one for Breaking Dawn, which shows Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) being all romantic in the bedroom and whatnot. Fans of the series know what this image leads to, and the result will become the main focus of the first part of this two-part Twilight finale. What do you think of this image? Does it give you goosebumps or headaches? The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is… Read More Read Comments

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New Images: ‘Breaking Dawn’ and ‘Captain America’

Actress Glenn Close said she is “distraught” that her image was used in one of a series of profanity- and slur-laden videos aboard the Navy’s USS Enterprise.

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Glenn Close slams raunchy Navy video