Jill Scott, Keyshia Cole and Brandy to Headline 2013 Essence Festival

Jill Scott, Keyshia Cole and Brandy are among 30 vocalists and groups scheduled to perform at the 2013 Essence Festival,   a four-day event on eight stages across New Orleans in July, organizers announced on Monday.  Now in its 19th year, the festival has become one of the most important forums for non-hip-hop black music and culture.

In addition to the musical acts, dozens of speakers - among them the Rev. Al Sharpton, Representative John Lewis and the author Steve Perry - will give lectures on topics like politics and healthy living. Other performers on the main stage this year will include Maxwell, New Edition, Charlie Wilson and LL Cool J. The smaller stages will feature acts like Anthony David, Big Daddy Kane, Bridget Kelly, Blackstreet, Les Nubians and Mint Condition.

An Early, Cover Your Mouth, Flu Season

N.Y.C. Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene Flu-related visits to health care providers are making up a much larger share of visits this flu season (red line) compared with other recent years.

For all of you New Yorkers stuck at home sniffling, coughing and cowering under the bedclothes with flu (or as the city's health department prefers to put it, flu-like illness), the city has a graph to make you feel less all alone.

It shows a bright red line shooting up like a rocket from November through December. This represents the rate of flu-like illness â€" though not necessaril y confirmed flu cases - being reported to New York City's syndromic surveillance system by 49 hospital emergency rooms and other “sentinel providers.”

The turbocharged red line has overshot the green, blue and purple lines that represent the flu-like illness rate from the three previous years, beginning in 2009. (The dotted line shows what the rate was predicted to be based on the rate for the past three years.) Those three years were milder seasons, confirms Jean Weinberg, a city health department spokeswoman, especially last year, and they do not compare with “our first wave of pandemic in 2009, which was higher,” a reference to the swine flu of that year.

As federal authorities have reported, the United States is experiencing the earliest flu season since 2003.

If it is any comfort, Ms. Weinberg said, the flu is not worse in New York City than in other parts of the country. “This is not a season that is out of the ordinary,” she said, “though H3 seasons (which the U.S. is having now) tend to be worse than H1 seasons.” She meant that the current flu was mostly caused by H3N2 viruses rather than H1N1.

The health department recommends vaccinations for anyone 6 months and older and offers a neat vaccine finder on its Web site.

City Names 17 Schools Slated to Close

In what has become an annual event in the era of mayoral control of the public school system, New York City education officials said Monday that they would move to close two schools this summer and begin to phase out 15 others that they characterized as the poorest performing.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said more schools would be added to the list on Tuesday, so that the proposals could be rolled out “in a respectful way,” and with time to properly contact those at the affected schools.

See list below.

Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002, his administration has closed around 140 public schools. Closing schools, and replacing them with new traditional public schools or charter schools in the same buildings, has been one of his signature education reform maneuvers. The proposals usually prompt emotional debates and boisterous public hearings in which parents and teachers, some of them enlisted by the United Federation of Teachers, stand up to voice opposition. Teachers cannot be fired when their schools close, but they frequently end up in limbo, drawing full salaries but unable to find permanent positions in other schools.

School officials cast the effort as a means of trimming the lowest-performing schools in a system with 1.1 million students. The schools on the closing list have 16,000 seats, which officials said would be replaced by other schools, including ones focused on career and technical education, like health and emergency management. Schools being phased out will remain open for their current students, but they will not admit other children.

“In every instance, where we phase out a school, we are replacing those seats,” said Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor.

There is little question that the Panel for Educational Policy will approve the list, since a majority of its members are appointed by the mayor. Still, from year to year, some schools appear, disappear and reappear on the so-called closing list due to other factors.

One such school, the Choir Academy of Harlem, was first cited for closing in 2009. But those plans were stymied when a judge sided with the teachers' union and others who had sued to stop its shutdown. Whether another reprieve comes for the school, which is well known for jazz and gospel singing, is unclear.

This year the schools on the list, aside from the Choir Academy, are seven high schools, six middle schools and three elementary schools distributed roughly equally across four boroughs; no Staten Island school was listed.

The two schools slated to close completely this year are Freedom Academy High School in Downtown Brooklyn and Middle School 45/S.T.A.R.S. Prep Academy in East Harlem.

Herbert H. Lehman H igh School in the Bronx remains in the Education Department's cross-hairs. It was slated to close and reopen in September in plans that never came to fruition. The school's principal, Rose LoBianco, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Other schools on the list are Sheepshead Bay High School, in Brooklyn; the High School of Graphic Communication Arts, in Manhattan; and the Law, Government and Community Service High School in Queens.

Academics are one factor the school system measures in making closing decisions. For the elementary and middle schools on the list, a large majority of the students scored below average in state standardized tests in English and math. For the high schools, the average graduation rate in 2010-11 was 54.4 percent, versus a citywide average of 65.5 percent, officials said.

“We expect success,” Mr. Sternberg said in a statement that continued: “We've listened to the community and provided comprehensive supp ort services to these schools based on their needs. Ultimately, we know we can better serve our students and families with new options and a new start.”

The Bloomberg administration has argued that new schools generally perform better than the ones they replaced. But studies have also suggested that schools being closed tend to have high concentrations of the demographics who do poorly, and that as the city continues to close schools, those students become concentrated in fewer and fewer schools - which are then closed themselves.

Norm Fruchter, the senior policy analyst at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, a nonprofit educational research and policy group, said the group analyzed the elementary and middle schools on the city's list and found they had much higher percentages of black and Latino students than the city average, as well as much higher percentages of pupils qualifying for free lunches than the city average.

Also, he said, “they hav e a higher percentage of special ed, a higher percentage of English-language learners and a higher percentage of special education students in self-contained classes.”

“It looks like these schools got these extra percentages in the years before they were tapped for closing,” he said. “They are closing the schools that have the most challenges, rather than trying to intervene to end the cycle of just closing the school and sending the kids somewhere else, and then when they get the same results they will just close that school.”

Here are the schools slated to close:

This Summer:

-Freedom Academy High School, Brooklyn
-M.S. 45/S.T.A.R.S. Prep Academy, Manhattan

Phased Out:

-M.S. 203, Bronx
-Herbert H. Lehman High School, Bronx
-P.S. 064 Pura Belpre, Bronx
-Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications, Bronx
-M.S. 142 John Philip Sousa, Bronx
-P.S. 167 The Parkway, Brooklyn
-J.H.S . 166 George Gershwin, Brooklyn
-J.H.S. 302 Rafael Cordero, Brooklyn
-Sheepshead Bay High School, Brooklyn
-Gen. D. Chappie James Middle School of Science, Brooklyn
-High School of Graphic Communication Arts, Manhattan
-Choir Academy of Harlem, Manhattan
-Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School, Manhattan
-P.S. 140 Edward K Ellington, Queens
-Law, Government and Community Service High School, Queens

Readers Share Own Stories of Death on the Tracks

A front-page article last week by our colleague Matt Flegenheimer about subway operators whose trains fatally struck people drew nearly 200 comments. Some called for installing sliding barriers on the platforms, a proposal that transit officials said would be “both expensive and extremely challenging,” though not out of the question. Some readers wondered why trains did not simply slow down sooner, even if it meant delaying commutes.

But many readers chose to share their own stories, or those of loved ones, of what it felt like to bear witness to â€" and then live with - a violent and seemingly unstoppable death. Here is a selection of comments, some of them fairly graphic:

In 1993, I was in the front car of a train pulling into Penn Station that hit and killed a blind woman. She had fallen onto the tracks and there wasn't enough time for the train to stop.

Everything that happened in the seconds before the accident is frozen in my memory forever. The cries from people on the platform, their arms waving to warn the motorman, the faces of my fellow passengers who stayed turned toward the platform, the jerk of the train, and that horrible sound. My heart goes out to the M.T.A. employees who unwittingly become part of such tragedies.
- Susan, UWS

I am a survivor of an attempted “suicide by train.” In December 2010, I attempted to kill myself at the Hollywood/Vine station of the Los Angeles Metro. I had planned the suicide for months, and I thought there was no way I could survive the attempt. As I was planning, I took into account my family, my friends, my landlord, my neighbors, everybody I could think of. Everybody but the Metro train operator. I cannot imagine the anguish that I must have caused that person! As I jumped before the train entering the station, I looked right into the operator's eyes, something I'm told is nearly universal in suicide attempts. I cannot fathom how that must have felt to the person who was hopelessly about to hit me in that tunnel. I have spoken to bus drivers who refused to transfer to the subway, because of that hopelessness. The bus driver can brake and steer, but the subway operator can only brake, knowing that the impact is inevitable.

My permanent injuries have been limited to the loss of an eye, some facial disfiguration, and some slight mobility issues on my left side. Thank God, I am recovering from the alcoholism that led to the hopelessness I felt at that time. I have been sober nearly two years, now. I'm doing O.K. I can only hope that the poor soul who hit me that December day is doing as well.
- Ron Iseli, Los Angeles, CA

I was a train driver on the London Underground for over 31 years. On the 4th day after I qualified as a driver, a boy of about 19 jumped under my train. Just before he jumped, I had this feeling that he was going to jump. I dropped the dead man's handle, the train started to slow and then I saw him jump. I heard the thud as the front of the train hit him. When I got out and looked under the train, he was lying unconscious across the tracks but the train had not gone over him. He survived with minor injuries. Cut a long story short, sometimes in my dreams, I still see that boy jumping in slow motion in front of my train. This took place in 1978! After that incident, I was involved in dealing with 3 more suicides. We were given 3 days to recover from the ordeal and then expected to get on with it. We got no compensation, no one had heard of counseling. It took me years to get back to some sort of normality, but at work, we had to have this macho facade, in the canteen we had to behave as if the “one under” (as we called it in those days) hadn't affected us at all.
â€"didar, Brisbane

It's a wonder there is not an early warning system from the platform to alert a train if a person has fallen. If the technology does not already exist it could not be very difficult to create.
â€"Mrs Mandelbaum, New Haven

With friends at Astor Station years ago, heard a boom as we walked down the curved platform. In raced the train with a woman “jumper” attached at front, a rag doll-ball rolling with the curve, spiraling along the side of the train, flailing, down impossibly, into the small gap between that train and that platform. And then she disappeared.

For the next six months I was afraid of cars, trucks, bikes, trains… anything that moved. People (myself included) take for granted that this behemoth called the subway train can be controlled.
â€" Kevinizon, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Trains can be scheduled to enter the station at a crawl. This would add more time to commutes, but perhaps we are a little too interested in getting to work on time to advocate for this solution. Another solution is to create public service ads telling people what to do if they fall onto the tracks. We already have them about what to do if the train is stopped in between stations, or if we see something suspicious.
â€" Neil, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Many years ago I was a passenger on a train that hit someone. I will never forget hearing the motorman say, “We have a jumper.” Those words almost sounded callous until the motorman walked through the train and I saw the look on his face. All I could think was that he had to live with this. The passengers had to walk forward to exit the train and then past the victim, who someone said was still alive (I could not look). My day was ruined; I'm guessing it was a lot worse for that poor motorman.
â€" ddempsey1, N.Y.C.

I am a train operator for the D-line for New York City Transit. I had one person lay down in front of my train wor king the Q one night while entering the Kings Highway station southbound. When I saw the man, my heart just entered my mouth. I couldn't even get the strength to turn the key to open the door to climb down to see if the person was all right. I couldn't even draw the breath to speak on the radio. I had my conductor talk to control center for me. Fortunately the man survived, was in one piece and barely a scratch. Weirdly enough, there was another 12-9 in Astoria within the same hour. Another time last summer, I pulled into 34th Street and somebody came to my window to report someone that fell onto the tracks across the platform on the F local track. I rushed to take a look and saw a man frying to death on the 3rd rail. I went back to my cab and reported it. I was freaked out for days. It somehow wound up on YouTube and I got to watch it. Somehow it made me feel a little peace knowing that it was already too late when I got there and there was nothing I could do. The man was d runk, took off his shirt and laid down across the rails with wet hair against the third rail. Probably a suicide. These things happen so much and rarely catch media attention.
â€" banjfoxx007, New York

This is an old, old, very sad story. My late father was a motorman for nearly 40 years, from the '30s to the '60s, with time off for the war. All the “old-timers” had similar stories. My father once told me that over the course of his working life he “had killed” a total of 5 people. They had all jumped in front of his train. But think about that phrase: he felt that he had killed them. The last suicide occurred the day before Thanksgiving in 1965, and I will never forget how he looked when he came home that night. His face was as gray as concrete. He sat in his place at the kitchen table, staring, saying nothing, his 17-year-old daughter pleading, “Daddy, Daddy, please, it wasn't your fault.” He finally spoke, and said, “I saw him jump, but I couldn't stop. I tried to stop, but there wasn't enough time. His wife was there. I saw her on the platform. She kept saying, ‘He didn't have to do that.' I wanted to talk to her, but the supervisor wouldn't let me.”
â€" patsy47, Bronx, N.Y.

I once saw a man fall into the subway tracks in Boston, and I was the only one in the station who saw him faint. Fortunately, Boston has a train approaching announcement system, and I eventually rounded enough fellow passengers willing and not afraid to jump off the elevated platform and drag him out. Boston subways are also nowhere as crowded, and the trains arrive in the station reasonably slow. I visited N.Y.C. the weekend after this incident, and I became hypersensitive and agoraphobic in N.Y.'s subway system. The trains in N.Y.C. arrive at the station incredibly fast, the platforms are narrower, and the crowding is ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I'm tightrope walking along the yellow line. Surely, if the city can afford to revamp Times Square and add disability ramps, they can consider diverting revenue to more safety measures.
â€" ShareNCare, Boston

\'Mary Poppins\' To Fly Off as \'Aladdin\' Lands on Broadway

The Broadway musical “Mary Poppins” will close on March 3 at the New Amsterdam Theater to make way for extensive renovations of the Disney-owned house before its expected next tenant: A musical adaptation of the company's 1992 animated film “Aladdin,” according to two Broadway theater executives. The two executives spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss production plans that remain confidential. A Disney spokesman did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment on Monday.

Based on the children's books by P.L. Travers and the 1964 Disney film, “Mary Poppins” opened in November 2006 to mixed reviews, but has gone on to turn a profit for Disney and its producing partner on the show, Cameron Mackintosh. The show will have run more than 2,600 performances on Broadway when it closes.

The “Aladdin” musical had its premiere at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle in the summer of 2011, and another production of the show ran last summer in St. Louis. The two theater executives said that the New Amsterdam renovations were expected to take several months and that “Aladdin” would probably not begin performances on Broadway until the spring of 2014.

The movie version â€" which featured Robin Williams as the voice of the genie â€" won two Academy Awards, for best original score and best original song (“A Whole New World”); the stage version, like the movie, has music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. Chad Beguelin wrote the book for the theatrical version and contributed to the lyrics.

The New York Post first reported on Monday that “Aladdin” would follow “Mary Poppins” into the New Amsterdam.

Cold Spell Hits Broadway Box Office

After a record-setting week for several Broadway shows between Christmas and New Year's Eve, the traditional post-holiday blues hit the theater district on Sunday, with five productions closing â€" including two, the musical “Chaplin” and the play “Dead Accounts,” that had particularly struggled to sell tickets. Producers often shutter shows right after the new year, when the profitable holiday season gives way to the reliably coldest months â€" January and February â€" on the Broadway calendar.

“Dead Accounts,” which starred Katie Holmes and Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz, grossed only $254,255 in its final week of performances, or 26 percent of the maximum possible gross. “Chaplin” went o ut on a higher note, grossing $509,381, or 52 percent of its maximum potential.

The three other productions that ended Sunday were the holiday musical “Elf,” the new play “Grace,” and the long-running hit “War Horse,” which won the Tony Award for best play in 2011. “Evita,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Golden Boy,” and “Peter and the Starcatcher” will close later in January. (“Peter” is expected to re-open Off Broadway in March.)

Broadway's two top-grossing shows, “Wicked” and “The Lion King,” each took in more than $2 million last week, a healthy haul for early January, while another hit, “The Book of Mormon,” broke the box office record at the Eugene O'Neill Theater for the 44th time, grossing $1,833,432.

Overall Broadway musicals and plays grossed $24.5 million last week, compared to $24 million for the comparable week last season.

Stolen Matisse to be Returned to Swedish Museum

Ever since a burglar smashed his way into Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art in the early hours of May 11, 1987, Henri Matisse's “Le Jardin” has been missing. Now the painting, valued at $1 million has been recovered and will be returned to the museum.

Ray Wells Henri Matisse's “Le Jardin,” stolen from Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art in 1987, has been recovered.

The painting was brought to the attention of Christopher A. Marinello, an art recovery specialist and a lawyer for the Art Loss Register, the international private database of stolen, missing and looted artwork.

Last month, Mr. Marinello said that Charles Roberts, a British art dealer, searched the register's database while deciding whether to handle the sale of the Matisse and found the match. Mr. Roberts said he had obtained the painting from an 85-year-old man, Mr. Marinello said. It is not clear where that man had gotten the painting. Mr. Marinello then negotiated the return of the painting, which is being held in London until its return to Sweden.

“I'm elated,” Mr. Marinello said in a telephone interview from London. “These things sometimes take two years. It's rare that I'm able to have a recovery in a three-week period, let alone over a holiday.”

Any further legal action would be in the hands of the Swedish authorities, Mr. Marinello said.

Bette Midler to Play Superagent Sue Mengers on Broadway

Frank Edwards/Fotos International, via Getty Images The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, center, with Faye Dunaway and the producer Robert Evans in 1975.

The recipe for a successful one-character play would, at minimum, seem to call for two things: a powerful woman to base it upon and a powerful woman to play her. And a newly announced theater project surely has both: Bette Midler will perform on Broadway for the first time in more than 30 years in a play about the Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers, its producers said on Monday. The play, called “I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” is written by John Logan and will be directed by Joe Mantello, and is scheduled to open on April 24 at a Shubert theater still to be determined.

Ms. Mengers, who died in 2011, was a rare female player in a male-dominated industry, alternately charming and ruthless (on behalf of her clients). Having climbed the entertainment industry ladder from a receptionist's position at a boutique talent firm to an agent's office at top companies like I.C.M. and William Morris, she went on to cultivate a roster that included performers like Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway and Michael Caine. After Ms. Mengers retired from the business, she continued to host informal salons for Hollywood's elite at her Beverly Hills home.

Mr. Logan, the Tony Award-winning author of the play “Red” and a screenwriter whose credits include the James Bond movie “Skyfall,” said in a telephone interview that the idea for “I'll Eat You Last” had been gestating since he met Ms. Mengers at a dinner in 2007.

“I thought she was an amazingly interesting woman,” Mr. Logan said. “And complicated - complicated in a way that is catnip to a dramatist.”

In 2011, Mr. Logan mentioned the project to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, who was a friend of Ms. Mengers's and helped him arrange interviews with many people who knew her - “friends, enemies, co-workers, clients” - in her life.

Mr. Logan said that Mr. Carter also helped him shape the central idea of the play, which takes place on a single evening. Asked what that evening was, Mr. Logan said he could not say. (“I mean, I want to say,” he added. “But I've been working on James Bond for so long, I'm so secretive about everything.”)

Ms. Midler “was always in my mind” as he wrote the pl ay, Mr. Logan said. “She's a proper stage animal. In a one-person show in particular, you need someone who can hold an audience, who connects with an audience in a really deeply visceral way, and that's Bette through and through.”

Ms. Midler, the Grammy- and Emmy-Award winning star of “The Rose,” “Beaches” and “The First Wives Club,” began her Broadway career as an understudy and replacement cast member in the original production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” She has since appeared in limited-run productions and concert tours like “Bette! Divine Madness,” which ended its Broadway run in 1980, and won a special Tony Award in 1974. Ms. Midler was also a producer of the recent Broadway musical “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.”

“I'll Eat You Last” is produced by Mr. Carter, Arielle Tepper Madover, James L. Nederlander and the Shubert Organization.

Video Shows 4 Sought in 16-Year-Old\'s Killing

The police have released a surveillance video of four young men they describe as “persons of interest” in Friday's shooting death of a 16-year-old, Raphael Ward, on the Lower East Side.

The video, taken “not long” before the shooting, shows the four inside the deli at 49 Columbia Street where Raphael collapsed after he was shot, the police said.

Screengrab from N.Y.P.D. video. The police are looking to speak to these men in connection with the shooting of Raphael Ward.

A police spokesman declined to say what role any of the four might have played in the shooting but said, “We want to speak to these people.”

Raphael was shot around 9 p.m. at Rivington and Columbia Streets, a block from his apartment in the Baruch public housing complex.

He had sought shelter in the deli when a gunman appeared in the plaza. Raphael then emerged, only to be shot in the chest, witnesses said. The shot sent Raphael reeling back into the store, where he collapsed, the police said.

The police said that as Raphael collapsed he spoke to a few friends inside the store, indicating that the person who shot him might have wanted to steal his jacket.

Anyone with information about the shooting or the four young men in the video is a sked to contact Crime Stoppers.

Maura Tierney and Courtney B. Vance Join the Cast of \'Lucky Guy\'

Left, Starla Fortunado; Maura Tierney and Courtney B. Vance will star with Tom Hanks in “Lucky Guy” on Broadway.

The actors Maura Tierney and Courtney B. Vance will join the previously announced Tom Hanks in the cast of “Lucky Guy,” the Nora Ephron play coming to Broadway this spring, the show's producers announced on Monday. A bio-drama about the late New York City tabloid columnist Mike McAlary (to be played by Mr. Hanks), “Lucky Guy” is set to begin previews at the Broadhurst Theater on March 1, with open ing night scheduled for April 1. George C. Woolfe, a Tony Award winner for “Angels in America” and “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” will direct.

Ms. Tierney, an Emmy Award nominee for her role on “E.R.,” is making her Broadway debut in the role of McAlary's wife, Alice, though she is no stranger to the stage. In 2010 she appeared in the Wooster Group's revival of “North Atlantic” and she has also starred in plays by Nicky Silver and Jon Robin Baitz.

Mr. Vance, a two-time Tony Award nominee, will play the role of Mr. McAlary's editor, Hap Hairston. Mr. Vance will return to Broadway for the first time since 1990, when he appeared in the original Broadway production of “Six Degrees of Separation.” (He made his Broadway debut in August Wilson's “Fences” in 1987.)

In addition to being Mr. Hanks's first time on Broadway, “Lucky Guy” will reunite him with Peter Scolari, who was previously announced to play the columnist Michael Daly. Mr. Scolari and Mr. Hanks starred in the NBC sitcom “Bosom Buddies,” which ran from 1980-1982. In it the actors played men who disguise themselves as women in order to live more affordably in an all-women's residence in New York.

Tweet This: \'Hashtag\' Named Word of the Year by American Dialect Society

The baby named Hashtag buzzed about on the Internet in November may or may not have been a hoax. But the American Dialect Society has given the Twitter-inspired term a boost by christening “hashtag” the word of the year.

The decision came at the society's annual meeting in Boston over the weekend, where more than 250 linguists, lexicographers, grammarians, historians and other word maniacs weighed the relative merits of terms like “fiscal cliff,” “Gangnam style,” and “marriage equality.”

There were votes in 10 categories, including Most Unnecessary (“legitimate rape”), Most Euphemistic (“self-deportation”) and Most Creative (“mansplaining,” meaning a man's condescending explanation to a female audience). â €œBinders (full of women)” was named top election-related word. “YOLO,” an acronym meaning “you only live once,” was named Least Likely to Succeed. (It also finished strong in a recent contest nominating terms that should be purged from the language.) “Sandy” was voted name of the year.

In the main category “hashtag” emerged as something of a dark-horse winner, edging out “fiscal cliff” and “marriage equality” (which took Most Likely to Succeed honors), despite not being on the official list of nominees, as Ben Zimmer, the chairman of the society's new words committee, noted in a rundown of the action. “This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Mr. Zimmer said in a statement.

But in language, as in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. In recent years, the society has given top honors to “occupy,” “app,” “tweet” and “bailout,” all of which seem to have some staying power. But in 1990, the first year of the contest, the prize went to the now-obscure “bushlips” (insincere political rhetoric), which beat out seeming no-brainers like “peace dividend,” “political correctness” and “bungee jumping.”

Wrong-Way Escalator Hurts 5 in PATH Station

A very long escalator at the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City lurched into reverse direction during Monday's rush hour, injuring five commuters, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said.

Screengrab via Youtube Several commuters were injured when an escalator at the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City reversed directions Monday. Click to watch video.

T he escalator was carrying commuters up from the platform, located about 75 below the street, to street level, shortly after 9 a.m. when it stopped, then started heading downward, said Ron Marsico, a Port Authority spokesman.

A video posted to Youtube shows confused and alarmed commuters trying to scramble uphill against the flow and yelling “Stop!”

Mr. Marsico said the injuries were “mostly bumps, bruises scrapes,” though three people were taken to hospitals. Those hurt included a woman with back and ankle injuries and a woman who was brought out of the station in a wheelchair and neck brace, he said.

O\'Neill Theater Center Honors Christopher Plummer

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center announced Monday that Christopher Plummer would receive its 13th annual Monte Cristo Award in recognition of his theater career, which includes two Tony-winning performances on Broadway - in the 1997 play “Barrymore” and the 1973 musical “Cyrano.” Mr. Plummer, 83, also won the Academy Award for best supporting actor last year for the film “Beginners.”

For years Mr. Plummer was a leading player in productions at the National Theater in London, and has been performing at the Stratford Festival in Ontario for more than 50 years. His last appearance on Broadway was in the 2007 revival of “Inherit the Wind,” for which he received his seventh Tony Award nomination.

Past recipients of the Monte Cristo Award award from the theater center in Waterford, Conn., include Michael Douglas, James Earl Jo nes, Harold Prince and Zoe Caldwell. The award will be presented to Mr. Plummer at a dinner in New York on April 15.