Last month, Chinese President Hu Jintao announced that his government was investing heavily in homegrown, exportable cultural programming. And yet, just days later, the government shut down two-thirds of its domestic satellite television shows for undermining Chinese values. ...

Video: Hunan Satellite TV’s Spring Festival Gala

Last month, thousands of mathematicians attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston — the largest annual gathering of its kind. In addition to presentations on phylogenetic algebraic geometry and trace formulas, the conference featured an art exhibition, with 80 artists presenting ....

Video: Mathematical Art

A new film called Miss Bala is an artful, riveting depiction of Mexico's drug war, and it isn’t the good guys-bad guys shoot-em-up you might expect. Instead, the story is told through the eyes of an innocent bystander: a beauty pageant contestant who finds herself in the wrong place at the ...

Video: A scene from Miss Bala

The drummer Jack DeJohnette has recorded with all the jazz superheroes of the last half century. But he tells Studio 360 that what he really wanted to do was play piano. He’d begun a promising career as a pianist when he was entranced by the drummer Vernell Fournier, who had ...

Video: Vernell Fournier plays with brushes

We received hundreds of submissions to our 420-character-story challenge. Although the contest is over, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to call a couple more authors and have them read their work ...

Submit your 420-character story here

In 2009 the composer Eve Beglarian spent four months traveling down the Mississippi River. The sounds and stories she gathered from the trip inspired her new collection of compositions, BRIM: Songs from the RiverProject. She performs songs from the album live in the studio ...

Video: "It Happens Like This"