Will Ferrell can make just about anything funny: playing the flute, negotiating with a toddler, just standing around in his underpants. For his latest movie, he joined a cast of Mexican actors for a role performed entirely in Spanish. Casa de Mi Padre is the big-screen version of ...

Graham Greene wrote more than two dozen novels between the 1920s and the 1980s — downbeat bestsellers set in sketchy places. Writer Pico Iyer has felt an almost mystical connection to Greene, whom he never met. He chronicles that obsession in The Man Within My Head ...

This month, light and space is oddly, magically graspable at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, New York. Doug Wheeler's SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 is an experience that is near-impossible to describe without using the terms "defies comprehension" and "mind-blowing," so we figured we'd get that out of the way now ...

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"

Bruce Springsteen's album Wrecking Ball comes out March 6. A recent press announcement supplied a track list of eleven hardscrabble-titled songs. We've come up with our own list of ten real song titles mixed up with ten ringers.  Can you pick the titles that Bruce wrote?

Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers. "I have been teaching for 15-plus years and have enough of what I deem 'apple crapple' to last me a lifetime." So we recruited the New York design firm Hyperakt to give teachers a ...

Video: Inside the design process

To rebrand educators for the 21st century, Studio 360 selected Hyperakt, a New York design firm that’s done projects for UNICEF and GOOD magazine, among others. At a recent brainstorming session, former public school teacher Jenna Shapiro summed up the concern of her colleagues ...

Kurt Andersen notes that we're in an age of flux and paralysis at the same time. In entertainment, we yearn for authenticity — but ten million of us watch the Kardashians every week. Where do we go from here? Playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick and Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams help ...

Kate Winslet was just 21 when she starred in the mega-blockbuster Titanic (1997). In high demand ever since, Winslet brings depth to her roles, from a former Nazi prison guard (The Reader, 2008) to a bored but complicated housewife (Little Children, 2006). The strains of marriage and ...

It seems like every Republican presidential campaign right now is doubling as a book tour (Michele Bachmann’s Core of Conviction: My Story, Ron Paul’s Liberty Defined, Rick Perry’s Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington). But this double duty is nothing new for candidate Newt Gingrich ...

Bonus Track: An Historian’s Analysis

For our next redesign project, Studio 360 is giving schoolteachers a makeover. Turns out a lot of teachers hate the treacly, old-fashioned visual imagery that gets dumped on them (ABCs, 123s, chalkboards, rulers, apples). One teacher told us she calls this iconography "apple crapple." ...

This year saw a record number of sequels, reboots, and spin-offs: of the ten highest grossing movies, only one, Bridesmaids, was entirely original. Kurt Andersen talks with Sharon Waxman, editor of Hollywood business site The Wrap, about why 2011 ended up being a mediocre year for films ...

For as long as there's been a World Wide Web, there's been a giant unresolved issue with what’s on it: those millions of songs, videos, TV and movie clips we enjoy for free — somebody owns each one. Now Congress is trying to tame the internet's wild west. This week the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on ...

Lily is a smart single woman, a beauty in demand on the party circuit. But Lily is nearing thirty, and struggling to manage money, friendships, and romance. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton examined the dangerous compromises facing a woman who wants to set her own destiny ...

Right now 20th century photography geeks are experiencing something of a perfect storm. From a new coffee table book, to a major museum exhibition, to images just made available on Wikimedia Commons ...

Kurt Andersen and Michael Kimmelman head to Lower Manhattan to check out the transformation of Zuccotti Park, the plaza at the center of the Occupy Wall Street protest. Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times. The protesters haven’t built permanent structures, but Kimmelman believes they are creating ...

Slideshow: On Location at Zuccotti Park

There are thousands of closed–circuit surveillance cameras in New York City. One of them belongs to the artist Wafaa Bilal. Last year, Bilal had a tiny camera surgically embedded in the back of his head. And since then, his camera has automatically snapped pictures of whatever is behind him — once per minute ...

Bonus Track: Name That Plant

This week, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced that Vladimir Putin would be United Russia's candidate next year, all but assuring him the presidency — possibly until 2024. Many in Russia saw this coming, and the country’s artists have been pioneering new forms of risky, highly public dissent ...

Slideshow: Political Russian Street Art

An epic poem written more than 2,000 years ago by a Roman named Lucretius may be one of Western culture's most profound examples of art anticipating scientific discovery and modern thought. The poem is called "On the Nature of Things", and it presents all kinds of radical ...

Wesley is a talented man. His third novel (under his given name, Wesley Stace) came out this year, a crime story called Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. Under the stage name John Wesley Harding, he always seems to have an album coming out. His twelfth is The Sound of His Own Voice ...

Video: "I Should Have Stopped"