On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Latest article in series, Writers on Writing, by Chitra Divakaruni, on her experience as fiction judge for 2000 National Book Awards; says five-month marathon of reading 300 books changed her understanding of novel form and forced her to see her own writing differently; photo (M)
Joyce Purnick Metro Matters column discusses Abe Beam's term as New York City Mayor following his death at age 94 (M)
Tina Brown's Talk magazine is having difficult start; newsstand sales are well below initial projections of Ronald A Galotti, president of parent company Talk Media; percentage of copies shipped to newsstands that actually sell is at bottom of industry; advertising pages and revenue are down from comparable periods of late 1999 to late 2000; Talk suffered from case of high expectations when its first issue arrived in summer of 1999, given visibility of its founders, Brown and Galotti; Brown and Galotti say they are optimistic about Talk's future; photo; chart (M)
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, leading trade group in television industry, is split on how its annual showcase, Emmy Awards ceremonies, should handle latest television craze, reality TV; some members argue that reality programs should not be honored at all; others accuse colleagues of snobbery and say success of programs like CBS's Survivor and Fox's Temptation Island is so strong that these shows deserve their own awards category; compromise has been struck: shows will get their own category, but will not be celebrated at grand award ceremony televised nationally; instead, they will be shuffled to less public ceremony for nonfiction programs; infighting leading to compromise exposes deep ambivalence with which television world is greeting proliferation of reality programs (M)
Article discusses tensions between Albanian students at Herbert H Lehman High School and other students, many of them black and Hispanic; full-fledged brawl in December between Albanian youths and others resulted in arrest of 13 students, including several Albanians; more than 15 students were suspended; photo (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of February 7, 2001, covering February 12, 2001.
Jennifer Lopez
Shaggy
Soundtrack
The Beatles
O-Town
2001Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Georgian footballer[†]
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is a Georgian professional footballer who plays as a winger for Ligue 1 club Paris Saint-Germain and the Georgia national team. Regarded as one of the best wingers in the world and one of the greatest Georgian players of all time, he is known for his dribbling, agility, and playmaking.
2001Kristina Söderbaum, Swedish-German actress and producer (born 1912)[†]
Beata Margareta Kristina Söderbaum was a Swedish-born German film actress, producer, and photographer. She performed in Nazi-era films made by a German state-controlled production company.
2001NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touches down in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.[†]
Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker, renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year. It was the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and land on it successfully. In February 2000, the mission closed in on the asteroid and orbited it. On February 12, 2001, Shoemaker touched down on the asteroid and was terminated just over two weeks later.
In 2001, the world population was approximately 6,254,936,459 people[†]