Whatever Charles Kuralt thought of Jack Kerouac, he borrowed the Beat author’s title and part of his concept for a long running series of vignettes on the CBS Evening News starting in the 1960s. Kuralt’s episodes were gathered in the ‘90s as a program f

Tinariwen has earned a reputation among world music fans for reconnecting the African-American sound of electric blues-rock with its African roots. The band originates in the hot, stony outback where Mali meets Algeria, a contested region in the souther

Ten years ago, The Blair Witch Project depicted a group of naifs lost in the woods of Maryland, their mounting unease turning to fear as they capture glimpses of horror on camera. Blair Witch’s co-creator, Daniel Myrick, revisits the general scheme in T

Opera buffs were fascinated by director Marta Domingo’s groundbreaking iteration of Puccini’s La Rondine. Although it’s a staple of opera repertoire, Puccini was apparently never satisfied with this popular work, debuting his musical setting for a sto

In the 1600s, Holland, then one of the world’s wealthiest nations, gave rise to a prosperous middle class whose merchants, shippers and wholesalers decorated their walls with pictures of themselves in their everyday surroundings. They looked for quality

The Taliban is, among other things, an enemy of culture. Before its rule ended in Afghanistan, the fantatical movement dynamited centuries-old Buddhist rock carvings and outlawed music. According to legend, they tried to exterminate birds because they s

Unusual rises from a grassy green field alongside the highway between Sauk City and Baraboo, drawing visitors and random passersby to stop on the shoulder for a look. The 10-acre site, called Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park, is one of several extravagant

As recently as the 1970s, only China specialists knew of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in the West. Sun and his book were ignored entirely in the 1975 edition of World Book Encyclopedia. But since then, The Art of War has been embraced by athletes and busine

When he died this spring, the lights were dimmed on Broadway in his honor. Horton Foote, age 92, was sometimes mentioned in the company of such great 20th century American playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. But for many

Protecting our own kind, humanity, against monsters is an age-old theme in literature. It’s the story of Beowulf and of the Hannibal Lecter series. In the former, the monster Grendel was plainly not one of us. In novelist Thomas Harris’ Lecter stories,

His mind on his investigation, NYPD homicide detective Sam Tyler steps from his jeep into the street and is knocked skyward by a passing car. When he left the earth, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” was on satellite radio. When he landed, it was coming from

The origin of the word fan comes from fanatic, and the etymology should serve as a caution. Often, fans want you to stay put, stuck on the flypaper of their narrow imagination. Just ask Bob Dylan about his fans at the Newport Folk Festival or Neil Young

Khaled El-Masri was a Lebanese man working in Germany and sending money home to his family. While on a bus trip in the Balkans, he was seized by CIA agents acting under the broad agenda of Bush’s war on terror. He was stripped, drugged, chained and fl

Desert rebel rockers sounds like marketing spin, but for once, a publicist’s label fits. Tinariwen is a band from the hot, stony outback where Mali meets Algeria, a contested region in the southern Sahara. Somehow these musicians, born of the nomadic

Says the narrator of the History Channel documentary: “Bruce Lee influenced popular culture more than anyone before or since.” Really? More than Elvis and the Beatles, or any number of Hollywood stars that made considerably more movies than the slender

Texting has become a source of cinematic terror. In the griping psychological thriller Fermat’s Room, three brilliant mathematicians and an inventor are trapped in a locked room with a PDA. An unknown tormentor sends enigmatic questions in math or log

Amnesty International put itself at the forefront of popular culture in the ‘70s when—years before Live AID—it inaugurated a series of “Secret Policeman’s Balls” to call attention to oppression in nations all over the world. The wonderful effect of Amne

Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic (2000) was a good film that pales alongside its brilliant source, the British television mini-series “Traffik” (1989). A “20th anniversary Edition” DVD (out Sept. 29) gathers all six episodes of a story that cam

In 1969, during the summer of Woodstock, the eyes of the world were glued to a lurid news story out of LA. The wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, and her companions, were found slaughtered in the director’s posh suburban home. Cryptic remarks were lef

Rip! A Remix Manifesto (out now on DVD) is fascinating and infuriating in equal measure—at least for me, because it takes sides on an issue on which I’m divided. The documentary by Canadian “web activist” Brett Gaylor pushes the maximal view against the

They are legendary among students of early film, Fantomas and Les Vampires, a pair of serials from the 1910s. Their pulp fiction stories looked ahead toward the fantastic strain in action cinema, while seeming to invert the moral universe adopted by Hol

Neil Diamond rides the subway from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, to the neighborhood where he lived until he was 16, in “Welcome Home Neil.” The short documentary is a bonus track on Hot August Night/NYC (Sony Legacy), the DVD of his Madison Square Gard

Frank Lloyd Wright grew up at the end of the horse-drawn age in rural Wisconsin, an environment that stimulated rather than stunted his imagination. When comparing the houses he designed at the turn of the 20th century to their Late Victorian neighbor

Disney and animals have been inseparable since Uncle Walt built an empire around animated ducks and mice. In 1948 the Disney studio expanded its scope with a series of “True Life Adventures” that brought drama and comedy to beautifully photographed, ful

West Virginia is a beautiful state of low mountains and wooded hills and hollows. But in recent years, sections have been scarred and razed, transformed into a barren lunar landscape by a new method of coal mining called “mountain top removal.” Instea