Your favorite former prostitute from New Jersey will be breaking out the bubbly this evening. Ms. Ashley Alexandra Dupre is 24 today. Kirsten Dunst's celebrating, too. She's 27. Columbia University president Lee Bollinger is turning 63. Socialite Allison Sarofim is 41. Former Knicks coach Isiah Thomas is turning 48. Former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer is 59. Socialite Cynthia Lufkin turns 47. Cloris Leachman is 83. Rapper Lloyd Banks is 27. Willie Nelson is turning 76. And David Miscavige, the head of Scientology and the only man who can give Tom Cruise orders, turns 49 today.

The Hall of Fame player is the former coach and head of basketball operations for the New York Knicks. A magnet for controversy both on and off the court, he's been widely blamed for the team's lackluster performance and he also lost an embarrassing sexual harassment lawsuit in 2007.

Hey Rupert Murdoch, Photoshop CS3 costs only $649. Surely this means the New York Post can stop using Microsoft Paint to make is covers. On the one hand, one wonders if the obstinate refusal to adjust Isiah Thomas' skin tone on Thursday's cover might be a tacit acknowledgment of how social constructions of blackness have been imposed by the white hegemony from Shakespeare's Moor to Mark Twain to the Primitivism of American modernists who linked blackness with ideas of sexual lasciviousness. Our allegiance, on the other hand, lies firmly with Adobe.

From time to time the news cycle offers up an event of such import and complexity that it can only be comprehended through the medium of musical theater. This week resident composer Ben Greenman takes a closer look at the sexual harassment lawsuit against New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas.