Search results for

Los Angeles screenwriter Clifford Green contributes to our series "Summer Sounds" with the story of the quiet night on a lonely country lake where he heard nothing but his heartbeat.

Cultural diplomacy usually comes in the form of a traveling art show or celebrity visit, but this summer the Kennedy Center is engaging in a deeper kind of diplomacy; a fellowship program that provides training for arts managers from around the world.

Amy Dickinson describes the incident that makes her think of the sound of shovels penetrating hard dirt as part of our series Summer Sounds. Her dad once forced Amy, her sisters and a cousin to dig in the hot summer sun in the fruitless pursuit of saving a crop.

Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager who used analytics and statistics to stay competitive against other teams with much larger payrolls. Critic David Edelstein says the film, based on the 2003 Michael Lewis book, is "entertaining as a sports-underdog story."

"The truth of poetry is not the truth of history," according to the new poet laureate of the United States. Philip Levine's work is most famous for an urban perspective that began with a youth spent working in Detroit's automobile factories.

There's a free concert taking place at a forest in Germany, and the headline acts have come from far, far away. Guest host Jacki Lyden talks to New York-based artist Jeff Talman about his German sound installation, Nature of the Night Sky. Working with astrophysicist Daniel Huber, he used radiation and seismic data from stars and shaped it into music, played back after sundown each night in a Bavarian forest.

The Newsweek editor looks at how women helped bring about peace in Liberia; how they're changing the state of marriage throughout Asia; and the rise of Christine Lagarde to the top of that notoriously male-dominated institution, the International Monetary Fund.

Neda Ulaby reports that for all that comedy has faced since Sept. 11, reports that irony would fizzle out turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Comedy, like anything else, adapts.

In a Disney Store in Southern California, displays include playful child-size mannequins that encourage shoppers to interact with the merchandise.

Author J.K. Rowling, Of Harry Potter fame, has launched a new website. There's not much there except illustrations of two owls and a link to a clock — counting down to six days from now, when the author plans to announce her mysterious new project. Rowling's publicists are only saying it is not a new book.