Cemetery Fixtures Stolen, Police Say, but Not Carried Away

Courtesy N.Y.P.D. The police identified this man as Louis Peduto and say he is wanted in the theft of $189,000 worth of air vents and brass handles from St. Raymond Cemetery in the Bronx on Monday, the day the photo was taken.

The police are looking for a man they say stole $189,000 worth of air vents and brass door handles from a cemetery in the Bronx on Monday, even though he did not get away with the loot.

The thief was seen in St. Raymond Cemetery around 8 a.m. Monday withthe metal goods, which he had removed without permission, the police said. When confronted, he fled without taking the items, the police added.

On Tuesday afternoon, the police identified the suspect as Louis Peduto, 56, and said he was known to frequent the cemetery.

Public information officers at the Police Department said they did not know how the thief had been carrying or carting the $189,000 worth of metal.

Nor could they explain the circumstances surrounding a photo of Mr. Peduto they circulated, which they said was taken on Monday at the cemetery and shows him holding what looks like a plastic tulip and posing calmly for the camera.

No one answered the phone at the cemetery late Tuesday afternoon.

Anyone with information about Mr. Peduto’s whereabouts is asked to contact Crime Stoppers.

Kelly Clarkson Assails Clive Davis Over His Memoir

Kelly Clarkson accused the label executive Clive Davis of distorting their tumultuous history in his newly published memoir “The Soundtrack of My Life,” saying his account of how he managed her career was full of “memory lapses and misinformation.”

“Growing up is awesome because you learn you don’t have to cower to anyone â€" even Clive Davis,” Ms. Clarkson said in a vitriolic letter posted on the Whosay Web site.

In his book, Mr. Davis, the founder of Arista and currently the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment, paints a portrait of Ms. Clarkson as a headstrong and outspoken diva who sometimes ignored his advice.

He said she bitterly opposed putting “Since U Been Gone” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes” â€" two songs written by th hitmakers Max Martin and Dr. Luke â€" on her second album, “Breakthrough.” Both became big hits and helped her career.  Mr. Davis relates how Ms. Clarkson “burst into hysterical sobbing” when he insisted on including the tracks.

He also accused her of disregarding his advice to delay the release of her third album, “My December,” on which she co-wrote the songs, because he believed it did not have enough tracks with Top 10 potential.  That album had only one Top 10 hit and sold few copies compared to “Breakaway,” which sold more than six million copies in the United States alone and established Ms. Clarkson as a major pop star.

In her letter, Ms. Clarkson denied she had resisted putting “Since U Been Gone” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes” on her second record, though she recalled wanting more guitars in the mix. “Not true at all,” she said. “His stories and songs are mixed up.”

She said the only time she had ever cried in Mr. Davis’s office had happ! ened later, when she played him “Because of You,” a song she had written for her third album.  “I cried because he hated it,” she recalled. She added, “He continued on about how the song didn’t rhyme and I should just shut up and sing.”

Ms. Clarkson also defended “My December,” pointing out it sold more than one million copies.  She accused Mr. Davis of refusing to throw his weight behind the album.  “He doesn’t mention how he stood up in front of his company at a convention and belittled me and my music and completely sabotaged the entire project,” she said. “It never had a chance to reach its full potential.”

It is not the first time the two have sparred publicly about “My December,” which came out in the summer of 2007. Mr. Davis complains in his memoir that after their disagreement about releasing the album, Ms. Clarkson and her manager had “launched what amounted to a media campaign pitting her against the label and, more specifically me,” accusing himof stifling her as a songwriter.

“It’s clear that Kelly Clarkson has a decidedly independent streak, to say the least, and often speaks in public before she realizes the implications of what she’s saying,” Mr. Davis wrote in the book.

Why Are School Buses Yellow A Teachers College Professor Said So

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Frank W. Cyr at the wheel of a school bus in Manhattan, in 1989, at an event to celebrate the 50th year of the yellow school bus.

Mehdi Taamallah/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images The standard color of America’s school buses is known as national school bus yellow./div>

A question came to mind as school bus drivers prepared to start their engines on Wednesday on 7,700 public-school routes in New York City and end their monthlong strike: Why are most school buses yellow

Why not some other color Why not burnt sienna, like a crayon Why not light-medium robin’s egg blue, like a jewelry box Why not magma orange, like a Lamborghini

The answer is Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who became known as the “father of the yellow school bus” for research he led in the 1930s.

Dr. Cyr, who died at 95 in 1995, had traveled the country, surveying pupil transportation in an era when school buses cost $2,000 apiece but differed widely from manufacturer to manufacturer and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some states had safety standards; some left the task to local school districts. “In ! many cases, standards have been set up by more or less hit-and-miss methods,” according to an account that Dr. Cyr oversaw.

Then, in the spring of 1939, he called together educators, school bus manufacturers and paint experts for a conference that approved the nation’s first school bus safety standards â€" 42 pages covering everything from axles, batteries and emergency brakes to the inside height of the passenger compartment to, yes, the color that the world saw outside. The standards were published in a booklet with a yellow cover: the yellow was the color the group had chosen.

“They wanted a color that would stand out, that other drivers could see from a distance and that would be identified with a school bus so whenever we saw it, we’d think, there’s a group of kids going someplace,” said Frank Cyr’s son, William. “Before that, they sent kids to school in anything.”

Buses, trucks and even horse-drawn wagons carried schoolchildren in those days. Some buses were paintedin drab colors. Some administrators suggested red, white and blue, apparently not to make the buses more visible but to make the passengers more patriotic.

For his part, Frank Cyr understood the importance of standardization. “For every different color,” he recalled in 1989, “the bus companies had to have different booths to spray-paint them.”

Yellow was hard to miss, even in weather so bad your mother made you wear galoshes. But which yellow This is like asking what color is the White House.

“I remember as a kid, he had color samples,” William Cyr said. “He had a desk at home in his study and he would lay the samples out across his desk and look at them. He would talk about the samples as being orange. As I remember it, they were a gradation from orange over to a pale yellow.”

At the conference in 1939, he displayed 50 shades of yellow, from a deep, lemony yellow to a deep orange-red. He recalled in 1989 that the group appointed a committee of education offici! als to ma! ke the final color choice.

“The color they selected was and remains ‘national school bus chrome,’” said Bob Riley, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services. “I don’t know why the word ‘chrome’ was in there, but it has something do with the makeup of that paint.”

The most recent version of the standards, approved in 2010, calls the color “national school bus yellow,” and Mr. Riley said there is a specific formula for it.

“I’ve seen it,” he said, alluding to the formula. “We used to have it on our Web site. I think we dropped it off the Web site because nobody ever asked for it.” But, he added, “You can’t buy a bus that doesn’t meet that formula.”

Other specifications adopted at the school-bus conference have been revised over the years, but not the yellow, even though it is a relic from before the eye-popping palettes of artists like Andy Warhol and Peter Max.

“If they had to do i today, who knows if it would be the same, because now they have brighter, more noticeable things,” Mr. Riley said. “Think of the vests highway workers wear. Obviously, they’re even more noticeable than national school bus chrome yellow. But the rationale for maintaining that color is its universal acceptance. We’ve all been born and raised knowing what that is.”

William Cyr said he remembered asking his father, “If you’re the father of the yellow school bus, what does that make me”

Frank Cyr had a ready answer: Anytime William saw a school bus, he could announce, “There goes one of my brothers.”

Russia Aims to Defuse Conflict Over Schneerson Collection

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said on Tuesday that he blamed “unjust rulings by the judicial authorities of another country” for the tensions over a collection of books and manuscripts that is being sought by the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic group, but offered to defuse the situation by transferring the works to a new Jewish center in Moscow.

Mr. Putin did not specifically refer to American courts, but he was clearly referring to rulings made in the United States, including one last month that ordered Russia to pay $50,000 a day for failing to hand over the Schneerson Collection, more than 12,000 books and 50,000 religious papers, as ordered earlier.

Mr. Putin, who stressed that the collection “belongs to the Russian state,” made his comments at a meeting of government officials held on Tuesday at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, whih was opened by a Moscow-based Chabad group last November.

The Moscow group is known for backing Mr. Putin, who said he is ready to transfer Schneerson Collection books held at the Russian State Library to the Jewish center and said that all sides in the conflict should gather to resolve the legal issues “and strive not to inflame the situation but search for a solution.” He also said that restitution of cultural property seized after the 1917 revolution is impossible because it would open a “Pandora’s box” of claims that Russia is not ready to address.

Jury Awards Mystery Writer Patricia Cornwell $50.9 Million

The best-selling mystery author Patricia Cornwell on Tuesday was awarded $50.9 million in a federal lawsuit, according to The Boston Globe.

Ms. Cornwell, best known for her series of books starring the medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, sued her former financial manager, the firm Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP, and the firm’s former principal, Evan Snapper, for negligence. The suit, filed in 2009, claimed that the company cost Ms. Cornwell and her company millions of dollars in losses and unaccounted revenue.

Lawyers for the defendants had blamed financial losses on the state of the economy and on Ms. Cornwell’s choices, including a temporary apartment in New York she rented for $40,000 a month, according to the Associated Press.

Through their lawyer, the defendants said they would explore an appeal of the verdict, the Globe reported.

Former BAM President to Receive Handel Medallion

Harvey Lichtenstein, the larger-than-life former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) - who transformed Fort Greene into a cultural hub and redefined the role of a performing arts center â€" is to receive the city’s highest award for achievement in the arts on Wednesday from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

“It’s recognition of the work I did in Brooklyn for about 30 years, which I’m very proud of,” Mr. Lichtenstein said about receiving the Handel Medallion.

In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg called Mr. Lichtenstein “one of the consummate arts administrators of our time whose tremendous career promoting innovative artists of all disciplines has dynamically transformed our City’s creative landscape.”

The actress Whoopi Goldberg is to present the rest of the Mayor’s Awards for Arts & Culture at New York Cit Center to six individuals and organizations in recognition of their cultural contributions to the city. These recipients are Anthony Armstrong, the principal of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School; the Ford Foundation; Philip Glass; the actor Edward Norton; the St. George Theater on Staten Island; and the artist Fred Wilson.

The ceremony will feature live appearances by performers like Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones and Mark Morris.

New York Producers Mull a Broadway Transfer for \'Glass Menagerie\'

The American Repertory Theater is in talks with New York producers about transferring its current revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” to Broadway in the near future, according to a theater executive familiar with the discussions.

The production opened this month at the A.R.T. to strong reviews for the staging by Tony Award winner John Tiffany (“Once”) and the four actors, particularly Tony winner Cherry Jones as Amanda Wingfield and Zachary Quinto as her son Tom.

The executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were meant to be confidential, said that if a financial deal can be struck, the timing of the transfer would depend on a Broadway theater vacancy - most of the best houses are now booked for the spring nd summer - and the availability of the cast members, who include Tony nominee Celia Keenan-Bolger as Laura and Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller.

The production has a narrow window for Broadway this spring. Performances end at the A.R.T. on March 17, and the play would need to open in New York by late April in order to qualify for this season’s Tony Awards. One factor complicating a spring transfer may be Mr. Quinto’s publicity schedule for his new “Star Trek” movie, in which he plays Spock; the film is set to open in May.

An A.R.T. spokeswoman, Kati Mitchell, declined on Tuesday to confirm or comment on the discussions about a possible transfer.

A.R.T. executives are talking to at least one Broadway producer, Jeffrey Richards, with whom they worked on the New York transfer last season of the Tony-winning “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” Mr. Richards declined to comment on Tuesday. He and several other theater producers and investors have been up to see the “Me! nagerie” production in Cambridge, Mass., and have expressed enthusiasm about a transfer, according to the two executives.

Mantel\'s \'Plastic\' Princess Remarks Ruffle Feathers in England

Hilary Mantel has won two Man Booker Prizes and huge sales for her novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,”with their acidic portrait of the doomed schemer Anne Boleyn. But her recent comments about another dark-haired royal wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, are getting some less than flattering reviews.

In a lecture delivered earlier this month at the British Museum, Ms. Mantel said that the former Kate Middleton, when she first appeared on the scene, seemed to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen,” with a “plastic smile” and “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

The press, cottoning on to the speech earlier this week after it was published in the London Review of Books, smelled a catfight. The Daily Mail called it “an astonishing and venomous attack.” The more liberal Independent weighed in with a side-by-side comparison of the two women’s experience, education and status as “style icons” (with a quote from Ms. Mantel’s wry account of shopping in “fat-lady shops”). Even Prime Minister David Cameron took a time-out during a trip to India to criticize Ms. Mantel’s remarks as “completely misguided and completely wrong.”

The novelist has hardly been without her defenders, with commentators noting that the remarks a! bout the duchess were about the media’s depiction of her, and took up only a few paragraphs of a long rumination on Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the nature of monarchy â€" none of which, as the columnist Hadley Freeman put it in the Guardian, could be “souped up into some kind of non-existent squabble between two high-profile women (Boleyn being, famously if rather inconveniently, dead.)”

Ms. Mantel has yet to comment publicly on the affair. But her essay contains what might be the seed of self-explanation, if not quite apology. After her remarks about Kate, she recalls a close encounter with Queen Elizabeth at a literary event at Buckingham Palace.

“I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones,” she wrote, adding: “For a moment she had turned back fro a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at. And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.”

PEN World Voices Festival Announces Lineup

Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press Salman Rushdie.

With Salman Rushdie returning as chairman, the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will bring more than 100 writers from around the world to New York City to discuss both their art and politics this spring, from April 29 through May 5. One major theme of this year’s edition of the festival, the ninth, will be the notion of bravery in those realms, with panel discussions and other events honoring writers who have shown courage in their lives and work.

An opening night reading will set the tone, with Ursula Krechel of Germany, A. Igoni Barrett of Nigeria and the Cambodian-American novelist Vaddey Ratner, a survivor of the hmer Rouge genocide, reading from works of their own about the notion of bravery. Other writers scheduled to participate in later events include Pierre Michon from France, Claudio Magris from Italy, Eduardo Galeano from Uruguay and three American writers with roots in the former Yugoslavia: Aleksandar Hemon, Charles Simic and Téa Obreht.

As is usually the case, PEN has scheduled events that focus on literary creation in societies that have experienced political stresses. Haiti and South Africa are two of the countries that will have dedicated events, and for the first time ever, the festival has organized a panel on Palestinian literature, moderated by the philosopher and critic Judith Butler.

A panel called “Bravery in Poetry” is also planned, on May 2, with well-known literary figures talking about poets whose writing they think exemplifies courage, and then reading from that poet’s work. Paul Auster is scheduled to talk about George Oppen, who moved! to Mexico during the McCarthy period, while Mary Karr will speak about Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet who resisted both Nazi and Communist rule. Other speakers include Edward Hirsch, who will talk about Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-born poet who migrated to the United States after persecution by the Soviet authorities, winning the Nobel Prize in 1987 and becoming United States poet laureate in 1991.

In recent years, the festival has sought to broaden its appeal with less-formal events, or “series that will engage audiences with literature in new and active ways,” as PEN calls them. On May 4, a panel of New York City taxi drivers will read original writing created at a series of workshops, and a “literary safari” on May 3 will allow audiences to wander from apartment to apartment in the Westbeth artists’ community for readings by residents and other writers.

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Bonnaroo and Firefly Festival Lineups Announced

Brian Bahr/Getty Images Paul McCartney performing at the Super Bowl in 2005.

The summer festivals are beginning to take shape, as Bonnaroo and the Firefly Music Festival released their lineups on Tuesday for this year’s events.

The headliners for Bonnaroo, the major four-day festival in Manchester, Tenn., will be Paul McCartney, Mumford & Sons and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. With more than 100 bands, the lineup is heavy with Americana-leaning rock groups and singers, among them the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, Wilco and the newcomer John Fullbright, as well as the usual collection of alternative andindependent rock bands: Grizzly Bear; Animal Collective; Beach House; Dirty Projectors; the xx; Passion Pit; and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros.

Hip-hop will be represented by Nas, Wu-Tang Clan and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. There will also be a few African imports: Bombino and the married Malian duo Amadou & Mariam are slated to play. The festival takes place June 13 to June16.

Now in its second year, the Firefly Festival in Dover, Del., will showcase headliners like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Vampire Weekend, the Avett Brothers and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among about 60 other bands. That festival will be held at the Woodlands of Dover International Speedway from June 21 to June 23. The lineup is mostly emerging alt-rock groups like Atlas Genius, Blondfire, Foxygen and Capital Cities, but there are also a few hip-hop acts in the mix, including Azealia Banks and K! endrick Lamar.

\'Les Misérables\' Coming Back to Broadway Next Year

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times A scene from the 2006 production.

A new stage version of the blockbuster musical “Les Misérables” will open on Broadway in March 2014, the producer Cameron Mackintosh said on Tuesday, in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Oscar-nominated film and restore luster to the show in New York after a short-lived 2006 revival that even Mr. Mackintosh now admits was ill-conceived.

This latest “Les Misérables” wil be missing a notable design element - a revolving turntable - that was used in the original Broadway production, which ran from 1987 to 2003, and the earlier revival, which closed in January 2008. The new version, which has been touring the United States for two years, also features redesigned scenery based on Victor Hugo’s paintings for his original novel, as well as new orchestrations that, as Mr. Mackintosh said, “get away from the crude electric-piano sound of the original.” And the staging is also different, with an emphasis on the gritty lot of the 19th century downtrodden in France; the directors are Laurence Connor and James Powell. (Trevor Nunn and John Caird won Tonys for their direction in 1987.)

Mr. Mackintosh is counting on these changes - plus the interest in the film, which has grossed nearly $400 million globally so far - to be enough to counter the risk of oversaturation of the “Les Misérables” brand.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Cameron Mackintosh in 2006.

“What we’re counting on is that people who loved the movie will now really want to see ‘Les Misérables’ on stage, and people who loved the original musical were swept up by the film and say, ‘I can’t wait for another chance to see it onstage again,’” said Mr. Mackintosh, the veteran producer of historic hits like “Cats” and the long-running “Phantom of the Opera.”

He has not conducted any market research or surveys of moviegoers to support his theory of demand for “Les Misérables” back to Broadway, but noted that ticketssales for the musical’s current tour only increased this winter as the movie was released. The tour grossed a strong $3.5 million for three weeks in Washington, D.C., in December when the film first opened, Mr. Mackintosh noted, and the current advance ticket sales for the London production have jumped in recent months by roughly 20 percent, to 6 million pounds (or about $9 million).

Still, Mr. Mackintosh has had misfires too. He acknowledged that he brought “Les Misérables” back to Broadway the last time too soon after the original closed, and said “in hindsight I wish I hadn’t done that, because coming back to New York in 2014 would be much more exciting without the last revival.”

“But there is no such thing as certainty in the theater, other than that you can make a mistake,” Mr. Mackintosh said.

He was only willing to concede so much on “Les Misérables,” however. He strongly defended the live singing in the “Les Misérables” movie, which its publicists ! ballyhooe! d as an artistic feat. Some critics and bloggers had “so what” reactions to the live singing, noting that it is common in theater, while others felt that recorded tracks might have bolstered the vocal performances of Hugh Jackman (as the hero Jean Valjean) and Russell Crowe (as the police official Javert).

“Having the actors switch their voices between pre-recorded and live, and having them sing in pre-recorded sessions before they even filmed the given scene, would have lacked immediacy and power,” Mr. Mackintosh said. “People who think we could have done it any other way just really don’t know how ‘Les Misérables’ works.”

The success of the film version - which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture - has emboldened Mr. Mackintosh to consider a musical-to-movie adaptation of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway from 1991 to 2001. He said that project was “down the track a good bit because I have a great deal else to focus on,” but indicatd that he was putting thought into directors and screenwriters for a “Saigon” film.

But first “Les Misérables,” which will run at a Shubert theater to be named later - and which Mr. Mackintosh hopes will run longer than the 15 months of the last revival. He said he was starting to think about casting, and added that he didn’t plan to cast any movie or television stars, whom producers often turn to for musical revivals. Asked if Mr. Jackman, a Tony Award-winning theater actor as well as a movie star, might do a guest appearance in “Les Misérables” on Broadway, Mr. Mackintosh acknowledged that his billing “would sell a few tickets.”

“If Hugh said he wanted to do it for a week or two, that’d be fine by me,” he said. “But that’s not why we’re doing this. ‘Les Misérables’ is the star, the material is the star, and what you want to do is find star performances from people who want to be in it - like we had with the movie.”

Help Find Con Man With a Badge, and Play \'What Did He Say\'

The police are looking for an apparently very persuasive man who showed a fake police badge to a Midtown subway traveler and got him to hand over his cellphone.

Security video released by the police on Tuesday shows the thief talking with his victim for a good 30 seconds after having already relieved him of his phone before the video begins. He appears to be explaining something.

The theft was around 8 p.m. on Jan. 13 at the 34th Street station on Eighth Avenue, the police said. After displaying the badge, the police said, the man asked the traveler to show him some identification and to hand over his phone, and the man complied.

At the turnstile, the police said, the man told the victim to go ahead, swipe his MetroCard and enter the station. The man then ran up the stairs and fled. The police have asked anyone with information about the crime t contact Crime Stoppers.

The police’s public information office said it did not know what the thief and his victim were saying to each other in the video. This is where you, dear reader, come in. Please send us the dialogue you imagine taking place between these two people. Keep it family-friendly, please. Thanks!

Help Find Con Man With a Badge, and Play \'What Did He Say\'

The police are looking for an apparently very persuasive man who showed a fake police badge to a Midtown subway traveler and got him to hand over his cellphone.

Security video released by the police on Tuesday shows the thief talking with his victim for a good 30 seconds after having already relieved him of his phone before the video begins. He appears to be explaining something.

The theft was around 8 p.m. on Jan. 13 at the 34th Street station on Eighth Avenue, the police said. After displaying the badge, the police said, the man asked the traveler to show him some identification and to hand over his phone, and the man complied.

At the turnstile, the police said, the man told the victim to go ahead, swipe his MetroCard and enter the station. The man then ran up the stairs and fled. The police have asked anyone with information about the crime t contact Crime Stoppers.

The police’s public information office said it did not know what the thief and his victim were saying to each other in the video. This is where you, dear reader, come in. Please send us the dialogue you imagine taking place between these two people. Keep it family-friendly, please. Thanks!

New Prize for Yiddish Plays

The National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene is announcing a new play contest to encourage writers and directors to conceive and develop new works in Yiddish. The winning play or musical will be showcased during the first New York International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, in 2015 to commemorate the centennial of Folksbiene (Yiddish for “people’s theater”), the longest continuously running Yiddish theater in the world.

The festival, announced last summer, is envisioned by theater officials as an ambitious week of concerts, film screenings and theater in many languages. Folksbiene, which is located in New York, still creates productions in the old language of Eastern and Central European Jews. It also has productions in English. Yiddish is a more than 1,000-year-old Germanic-based based language that has contributed terms like “oy vey” and “bagel” to the English vernaular.

“The purpose of the contest is to let Yiddish serve as a spark for creativity, to help find new, creative ways to explore the Jewish experience,” Bryna Wasserman, the executive director of Folksbiene, stated in announcing the contest. “Yiddish, despite its diminished role as a language of daily life, remains a cornerstone of Jewish identity.”

Contest submissions are being accepted through Sept. 1. (Visit www.nationalyiddishtheatre.org for guidelines.) New full-length plays or musicals, as well as mixed-media projects incorporating performance and music will be eligible.  Projects can be entirely or partially in Yiddish. Projects mostly in English will need to creatively incorporate Yiddish in different ways.

A short list of projects under consideration will be announced on Jan. 15, 2014.  These will be presented later in the spring as staged readings, which will be ev! aluated by Folksbiene’s jury. The winning project will be developed by Folksbiene for a premiere in June 2015. The jury now includes Emanuel Azenberg, the producer; Jason Robert Brown, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Parade”; and the playwrights Joe DiPietro (“Memphis”), Israel Horovitz and Jon Marans (“Old Wicked Songs”).

He\'s Talking to You: Scorsese to Give Jefferson Lecture for National Endowment for the Humanities

Chris Pizzello/Associated Press Martin Scorsese

Speak to Martin Scorsese for even a few minutes on one of his favorite subjects â€" movies; rock music; the best way for Robert De Niro to break down an door in “Raging Bull” â€" and you are likely to get an enthusiastic barrage of verbiage as rich and dense as any academic lecture. (With, perhaps, a few colorful words that your college film professor would never say.)

So what happens when Mr. Scorsese, th celebrated director of “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas” and “The Departed,” is invited to give a formal lecture by the National Endowment for the Humanities Audiences will find out when he gives its 2013 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

The organization said on Tuesday that Mr. Scorsese will be its 42nd Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, a prestigious honor that has previously gone to authors like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Morrison and Robert Penn Warren.

Jim Leach, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said in a statement: “Martin Scorsese is a scholar of, advocate for, and icon of American cinema. He is the first filmmaker designated as a Jefferson Lecturer, but he follows in the tradition of earlier speakers like John Updike, Barbara Tuchman, and Arthur Miller in revealing a profound understanding and empathy for the human condition.”

Mr. Scorsese’s lecture, on “the evolution of his films, the art of storytelling, and the inspiration! he draws from the humanities,” will be presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on April 1. Requests for free tickets can be made starting March 11 at neh.gov, and the lecture will also be streamed live from that site.

Mr. Scorsese will also receive a $10,000 honorarium â€" not quite as much as the Lufthansa heist, but it’s nice.

In Performance: Taylor Mac of \'Good Person of Szechwan\'

Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan” asks what it means to live a virtuous life in a corrupt society. In the Foundry Theater’s new production, the actor Taylor Mac takes on dual roles: Shen Te, a hospitable prostitute turned shopkeeper and, in disguise, Shui Ta, her more pragmatically minded male cousin. In this scene Shen Te reveals that she has taken on both identities and asks: “Why is suffering reserved for the good and why is so much wickedness rewarded” The show runs through Feb. 24 at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa.

Recent videos include scenes from “The Laramie Project” and Will Chase putting a country twist on a number from “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

Coming soon: Ethan Hawke singing a number from “Clive” and Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake in a scene from “Much Ado About Nothing.”

More Season 3 Conversation With \'Downton Abbey\' Creator Julian Fellowes

Nick Wall/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for MASTERPIECE Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham in Season 3 of “Downton Abbey.”

In the first installment of an interview with the “Downton Abbey” creator and writer Julian Fellowes, he discussed how some key departures from the series occurred in Season 3, and how he is starting to think about his own exit from the show.

In this final edited excerpt from that conversation, Mr. Fellowes talks about his approach to writing Season 3, characters who may (or may not) be returning for Season 4, and other “Downton”-relatd projects he may (or may not) be working on.

Lee Everett/The Mount, via Associated Press Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.”

Q.

Is there a tradition in Britain that Christmas specials â€" like the one that aired as the finale here in America â€" are supposed to be more uplifting, given the spirit of the holidays, than a typical episode of the series

A.

Not really, to be honest. Not here. Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It’s a general clear-out. The f! irst Christmas special we did of “Downton,” it was pretty Christmas-y. It was the proposal, which was very nice. But that isn’t particularly the tradition of these Christmas shows here. In a way, they’re supposed to be more dramatic than a ordinary episode of the series. So in that sense, we were fitting into the ethos.

Q.

The theme of the series is always people confronting change whether they like it or not, but was it a conscious decision to make that theme even more explicit in Season 3

A.

Yes, it was. We started the show in 1912, which was just before the Great War. When you get to the ’20s, you get into a very much accelerated rate of change. But it wasn’t completely clear how much the world had changed. There were new inventions of course, but at the same time, a lot of people, both rich and poor, were living in a pretty similar way to the way they’d lived before the war. But that was essentiall a chimera, and underneath the surface, in fact, the economic realities were making it clearer and clearer that actually, the world for most people had changed substantially. It would in the end be the Second World War that was the coup de grace for these Crawley type people. Not all of them - there’s still people with cooks and butlers. But as a way of life, enjoyed by a whole tier of society, that finished it off. And I like that. I like the febrile quality, particularly of the ’20s. Was it the modern world or was it all the same That seems to me, to lend itself to drama.

Q.

In the absence of major historical events this season â€" the sinking of the Titanic or World War I â€" you would focus on how more subtle developments affect the characters

A.

I think we’ve always had a kind of house style, of concentrating on their reaction to big things that are happening elsewhere. Some series, you have the door opening and Lloyd George and! Adolf Hi! tler and Ribbentrop all walk through it. We haven’t done that. We’re not saying that the Crawleys are ordinary - they live a life that was pretty unusual even then. But nevertheless, they’re quite deliberately not people who are in the thick of things. Tearing a pheasant with the prime minister on one side and the Queen of Romania on the other. We’ve chosen not to do that. Which I think is actually one of the strengths of the show.

Q.

Shirley MacLaine appeared on “Downton” this season as the mother of Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern). Where did the idea come from to cast her on the show

A.

We wanted very much to show that Cora came from a different tradition to Robert. There were a lot of these very rich girls who came over and married into the English upper classes and they saved masses of houses, at least for a bit Cora hasn’t come from some elegant Long Island, Daughters of the Revolution thing. Her father made a lot of money, and now she’s here. It gives her a robustness and it explains why increasingly, as the century goes on, she doesn’t feel she has to constantly align herself with aristocratic prejudices and principles. Because that’s not who she is. And we needed a mother who would make that instantly clear. We also needed someone who would be evenly weighted to Maggie Smith, so when they were on screen together, it wasn’t like a featherweight against a heavyweight. They were matched. In that, Shirley completely fulfilled both requirements. When she’s on screen with Maggie, you don’t know which one you want to look at.

Q.

Will you have her back for Season 4

A.

Oh, I hope we can. She’s very busy, and she has a lot of film offers! . I would! love to have her back in Series 4. I think Shirley agreeing to be in the show was a real mark of how successful it was. We loved having her, she was great.

Q.

It’s been reported that you’re writing a “Downton Abbey” prequel that would chronicle the courtship of Robert and Cora. Is this something you’re really working on

A.

I gave a lecture last year, and someone stuck up their hand and said, “Would you ever” - horrible word - “novelize the series” And I said, “The only novel I think you could write that wouldn’t interfere with the series, would be the prequel - the back story of Robert and Cora falling in love and her coming over as an American heiress.” Because we know he married her for her money but then he fell in love with her afterwards. But we don’t know how that happened. Well, by the time I got home, my agent had rung from L.A., saying, “Why idn’t you tell me there was a prequel” By the time I woke up the next morning, the prequel was in production and was being cast. As it happens, I think that book would be quite fun. But I haven’t got any plans to write it at the moment.

Q.

“Downton” took some critical lumps in Season 2 for plot developments that viewers felt happened too quickly or seemed beyond the scope of the series. Did this influence your approach to writing Season 3

A.

The British press had praised this to the skies throughout the first series. And when they do that, you know they’re going to hammer you in the second. We knew that before the camera had turned on. I remember someone said, “Oh, but the second series is so much faster than the first series.” It wasn’t faster at all. It was exactly the same. I think one was two and a quarter years, the other was two and a half years, or something. There was one thing where they got very excited about Ma! tthew’s! wound, and when he regained the use of his legs. That was a straight medical condition, which they could have looked up on the Internet. A lot of the diagnoses were made in tents on the edge of battlefields, by overworked doctors who hadn’t slept for a week. They were sent back to England with a probable diagnosis, which of course in many cases proved to be true. But in quite a few, proved to be false. And the business of a severed spine being confused with a bruised spine, there were many instances of that. But the papers didn’t want that. America doesn’t, as a whole, seem to have a problem with success. But Britain does. And you just have to not let it get you down too much while it’s going on. It’s like a war of attrition. If you’re still standing, then they stop beating you.

More Season 3 Conversation With \'Downton Abbey\' Creator Julian Fellowes

Nick Wall/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for MASTERPIECE Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham in Season 3 of “Downton Abbey.”

In the first installment of an interview with the “Downton Abbey” creator and writer Julian Fellowes, he discussed how some key departures from the series occurred in Season 3, and how he is starting to think about his own exit from the show.

In this final edited excerpt from that conversation, Mr. Fellowes talks about his approach to writing Season 3, characters who may (or may not) be returning for Season 4, and other “Downton”-relatd projects he may (or may not) be working on.

Lee Everett/The Mount, via Associated Press Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.”

Q.

Is there a tradition in Britain that Christmas specials â€" like the one that aired as the finale here in America â€" are supposed to be more uplifting, given the spirit of the holidays, than a typical episode of the series

A.

Not really, to be honest. Not here. Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It’s a general clear-out. The f! irst Christmas special we did of “Downton,” it was pretty Christmas-y. It was the proposal, which was very nice. But that isn’t particularly the tradition of these Christmas shows here. In a way, they’re supposed to be more dramatic than a ordinary episode of the series. So in that sense, we were fitting into the ethos.

Q.

The theme of the series is always people confronting change whether they like it or not, but was it a conscious decision to make that theme even more explicit in Season 3

A.

Yes, it was. We started the show in 1912, which was just before the Great War. When you get to the ’20s, you get into a very much accelerated rate of change. But it wasn’t completely clear how much the world had changed. There were new inventions of course, but at the same time, a lot of people, both rich and poor, were living in a pretty similar way to the way they’d lived before the war. But that was essentiall a chimera, and underneath the surface, in fact, the economic realities were making it clearer and clearer that actually, the world for most people had changed substantially. It would in the end be the Second World War that was the coup de grace for these Crawley type people. Not all of them - there’s still people with cooks and butlers. But as a way of life, enjoyed by a whole tier of society, that finished it off. And I like that. I like the febrile quality, particularly of the ’20s. Was it the modern world or was it all the same That seems to me, to lend itself to drama.

Q.

In the absence of major historical events this season â€" the sinking of the Titanic or World War I â€" you would focus on how more subtle developments affect the characters

A.

I think we’ve always had a kind of house style, of concentrating on their reaction to big things that are happening elsewhere. Some series, you have the door opening and Lloyd George and! Adolf Hi! tler and Ribbentrop all walk through it. We haven’t done that. We’re not saying that the Crawleys are ordinary - they live a life that was pretty unusual even then. But nevertheless, they’re quite deliberately not people who are in the thick of things. Tearing a pheasant with the prime minister on one side and the Queen of Romania on the other. We’ve chosen not to do that. Which I think is actually one of the strengths of the show.

Q.

Shirley MacLaine appeared on “Downton” this season as the mother of Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern). Where did the idea come from to cast her on the show

A.

We wanted very much to show that Cora came from a different tradition to Robert. There were a lot of these very rich girls who came over and married into the English upper classes and they saved masses of houses, at least for a bit Cora hasn’t come from some elegant Long Island, Daughters of the Revolution thing. Her father made a lot of money, and now she’s here. It gives her a robustness and it explains why increasingly, as the century goes on, she doesn’t feel she has to constantly align herself with aristocratic prejudices and principles. Because that’s not who she is. And we needed a mother who would make that instantly clear. We also needed someone who would be evenly weighted to Maggie Smith, so when they were on screen together, it wasn’t like a featherweight against a heavyweight. They were matched. In that, Shirley completely fulfilled both requirements. When she’s on screen with Maggie, you don’t know which one you want to look at.

Q.

Will you have her back for Season 4

A.

Oh, I hope we can. She’s very busy, and she has a lot of film offers! . I would! love to have her back in Series 4. I think Shirley agreeing to be in the show was a real mark of how successful it was. We loved having her, she was great.

Q.

It’s been reported that you’re writing a “Downton Abbey” prequel that would chronicle the courtship of Robert and Cora. Is this something you’re really working on

A.

I gave a lecture last year, and someone stuck up their hand and said, “Would you ever” - horrible word - “novelize the series” And I said, “The only novel I think you could write that wouldn’t interfere with the series, would be the prequel - the back story of Robert and Cora falling in love and her coming over as an American heiress.” Because we know he married her for her money but then he fell in love with her afterwards. But we don’t know how that happened. Well, by the time I got home, my agent had rung from L.A., saying, “Why idn’t you tell me there was a prequel” By the time I woke up the next morning, the prequel was in production and was being cast. As it happens, I think that book would be quite fun. But I haven’t got any plans to write it at the moment.

Q.

“Downton” took some critical lumps in Season 2 for plot developments that viewers felt happened too quickly or seemed beyond the scope of the series. Did this influence your approach to writing Season 3

A.

The British press had praised this to the skies throughout the first series. And when they do that, you know they’re going to hammer you in the second. We knew that before the camera had turned on. I remember someone said, “Oh, but the second series is so much faster than the first series.” It wasn’t faster at all. It was exactly the same. I think one was two and a quarter years, the other was two and a half years, or something. There was one thing where they got very excited about Ma! tthew’s! wound, and when he regained the use of his legs. That was a straight medical condition, which they could have looked up on the Internet. A lot of the diagnoses were made in tents on the edge of battlefields, by overworked doctors who hadn’t slept for a week. They were sent back to England with a probable diagnosis, which of course in many cases proved to be true. But in quite a few, proved to be false. And the business of a severed spine being confused with a bruised spine, there were many instances of that. But the papers didn’t want that. America doesn’t, as a whole, seem to have a problem with success. But Britain does. And you just have to not let it get you down too much while it’s going on. It’s like a war of attrition. If you’re still standing, then they stop beating you.

A Recipe for Pone

Dear Diary:

Sunday, I walk to Chelsea Market for cassava to make pone. They have only yuca, another scaly, mortar-shaped root.

At home I see my recipe says cassava is also “manioc,” also “yuca.” Now I’m late: one of my guests has a photography show closing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I haven’t seen it.

I take a cab back to the market; the driver asks why. Cassava pone They eat it in Suriname, where he’s from. His wife adds plums. I buy yuca and go straight to the Met.

The guard says no food, not even to check!

“But it’s a mortarâ€"” No, don’t say it.

I go to the visitors’ desk. A Samaritan on duty says he’ll hold it if I confess what I’m making.

I’ve sent him the recipe; he says he’ll try it this weekend.

Cassava Pone

(Barely adapted from Molly O’Neill’s adaptation from The Complete Caribbean Cookbook, by Pamela Lalbachan.)

2 cups peeled and coarsely grated cassava or cassava meal*
1 cup grated coconut
â…" cup sugar (if coconut is unsweetened; less if sweetened)
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced
1 cup milk (skim O.K.)
About 10 crumbled pecans and 1 tablespoon rum (my additions, though liquid makes it a little denser)
Since cabby’s wife uses plums, I presume other fruit would work too, like bananas
Cinnamon ice cream or coconut sorbet

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the cassava, coconut, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, butter and, if you’re using them, the pecans, rum and fruit. Stir in the milk. Pour into a greased 8-inch baking dish. Bake until golden brown, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Set aside to cool. Serve with ice cream or sorbet.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

*Cassava ! is available at the produce store in Chelsea Market (there called yuca), on the bottom left bin of the root vegetable lineup in the back, or any market that caters to Latinos. Cassava meal is also sold as tapioca starch or flour, and is available in some Asian stores.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

A Recipe for Pone

Dear Diary:

Sunday, I walk to Chelsea Market for cassava to make pone. They have only yuca, another scaly, mortar-shaped root.

At home I see my recipe says cassava is also “manioc,” also “yuca.” Now I’m late: one of my guests has a photography show closing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I haven’t seen it.

I take a cab back to the market; the driver asks why. Cassava pone They eat it in Suriname, where he’s from. His wife adds plums. I buy yuca and go straight to the Met.

The guard says no food, not even to check!

“But it’s a mortarâ€"” No, don’t say it.

I go to the visitors’ desk. A Samaritan on duty says he’ll hold it if I confess what I’m making.

I’ve sent him the recipe; he says he’ll try it this weekend.

Cassava Pone

(Barely adapted from Molly O’Neill’s adaptation from The Complete Caribbean Cookbook, by Pamela Lalbachan.)

2 cups peeled and coarsely grated cassava or cassava meal*
1 cup grated coconut
â…" cup sugar (if coconut is unsweetened; less if sweetened)
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced
1 cup milk (skim O.K.)
About 10 crumbled pecans and 1 tablespoon rum (my additions, though liquid makes it a little denser)
Since cabby’s wife uses plums, I presume other fruit would work too, like bananas
Cinnamon ice cream or coconut sorbet

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the cassava, coconut, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, butter and, if you’re using them, the pecans, rum and fruit. Stir in the milk. Pour into a greased 8-inch baking dish. Bake until golden brown, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Set aside to cool. Serve with ice cream or sorbet.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

*Cassava ! is available at the produce store in Chelsea Market (there called yuca), on the bottom left bin of the root vegetable lineup in the back, or any market that caters to Latinos. Cassava meal is also sold as tapioca starch or flour, and is available in some Asian stores.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.