Giulia:
Katie Halper
March 5, 2008 | 4:24 am EST
The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out our most popular articles of the week on a variety of subjects, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.
Katie:
Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan Surfaces 120 Years Later
Hallelujah For American Idol, Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen
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Nicole:
Google Gives Free Voicemail to San Francisco Homeless
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Turnes 80
Patrick Swayze’s Cancer Battle
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Gina:
“Chop Shop” - Dreams In a Place of Despair
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Kerry:
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Jason Castro sang Hallelujah on Tuesday’s American Idol, which made Simon, a fan of Jeff Buckley’s cover of the song, a very happy judge. But the irony of the Hallelujah’s American Idol-level popularity is that when Canadian singer songwriter Leonard Cohen first recorded the song in 1984 on his Various Positions album, Columbia records opted not to release the record because, at this point, Cohen was not as popular as he once was in America. But Cohen remained popular in Europe and in his native Canada. And Hallelujah wound up being one of his most popular songs ever. It was covered by artists including Rufus Wainwright, Bob Dylan, Regina Spektor, Bono, K.D. Lang, Sheryl Crow, John Cale to name just a few. But it was the late Jeff Buckley’s cover which became the most well known, and was ranked #259 on Rolling Stone’s “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and dubbed “the most perfect song ever” by Q Magazine.