In 2008, superstar rapper Lil' Wayne allowed a film crew full access to his hectic life.
More troops or fewer? That's the only question we seem to hear about Afghanistan these days, and it's the wrong question.
Actor Henry Gibson, who played roles ranging from loopy poets to vengeful Illinois Nazis and cranky judges during a 40-year film and television career, has died at age 73, his representatives said Wednesday.
Mary J. Blige has sung her way to nine Grammy Awards and sold 40 million albums worldwide.
Stepping into a Chicago, Illinois, classroom, Enoch Muhammad cranks up the stereo and Tupac's "Brenda's Got a Baby" blares into the students' ears.
ENCINO, Calif. -- When I last visited John Wooden three years ago, he needed a cane to help him walk, but he moved so briskly I had to hurry to keep up. He told me he still drove once in a while, and throughout our conversation he was energetic and sharp. He was happy, he was funny, and his memory was so good, it was easy to forget he was 96 years old.
"On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to H.M. Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti." The opening words of Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" couldn't be calmer, but the charge embedded within them ignited an era that merits his soaring title. It was a singular time, and this is a singular book.
Poet, dramatist and novelist, Wole Soyinka's work has left a large imprint on the literary landscape of Africa.
Seventh graders at Ron Clark Academy became an overnight sensation during the presidential election when their YouTube performance of "You Can Vote However You Like" catapulted them to online stardom.
A rainbow brought Ntozake Shange some peace.
In 2008, superstar rapper Lil' Wayne allowed a film crew full access to his hectic life.
More troops or fewer? That's the only question we seem to hear about Afghanistan these days, and it's the wrong question.
Actor Henry Gibson, who played roles ranging from loopy poets to vengeful Illinois Nazis and cranky judges during a 40-year film and television career, has died at age 73, his representatives said Wednesday.
Mary J. Blige has sung her way to nine Grammy Awards and sold 40 million albums worldwide.
Stepping into a Chicago, Illinois, classroom, Enoch Muhammad cranks up the stereo and Tupac's "Brenda's Got a Baby" blares into the students' ears.
ENCINO, Calif. -- When I last visited John Wooden three years ago, he needed a cane to help him walk, but he moved so briskly I had to hurry to keep up. He told me he still drove once in a while, and throughout our conversation he was energetic and sharp. He was happy, he was funny, and his memory was so good, it was easy to forget he was 96 years old.
"On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to H.M. Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti." The opening words of Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" couldn't be calmer, but the charge embedded within them ignited an era that merits his soaring title. It was a singular time, and this is a singular book.
Poet, dramatist and novelist, Wole Soyinka's work has left a large imprint on the literary landscape of Africa.
Seventh graders at Ron Clark Academy became an overnight sensation during the presidential election when their YouTube performance of "You Can Vote However You Like" catapulted them to online stardom.
A rainbow brought Ntozake Shange some peace.
Sebastian Junger found him crouched on a battlefield in Afghanistan, fighting to stay alive.
The first woman elected to one of poetry's most prestigious titles has stepped down amid controversy about her Nobel-prize winning rival.
A private team looking for a U.S. professor who disappeared on a volcanic island in Japan 11 days ago will descend Friday into a ravine the searchers believe he entered, a team representative said.
Japanese authorities will continue searching for a missing U.S. university professor on Wednesday, but they will reduce the size of search team, a police official said Tuesday.
Japanese police and U.S. Air Force helicopters were searching Friday for an American university professor who disappeared on a tiny volcanic island in Japan.
Japanese authorities have agreed to continue searching for an American university professor through at least Tuesday, more than a week after he disappeared on a volcanic Japanese island, colleagues and relatives said.
Whoever she was, Carol Ann Duffy is now Britain's poet laureate -- and the first woman ever to hold the prestigious literary post in its nearly 400-year history.
Teams in southern Japan are searching for an award-winning U.S. poet and college professor who failed to return from a hike to a volcano, his university said Thursday.
Emblazoned on a long, tall, concrete barrier in the midst of a rocky Middle Eastern landscape is this spray-painted message: "Mirror, mirror on the wall. When will this senseless object fall?"
The family history of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took another tragic turn Monday when it was revealed that their son had committed suicide after battling depression.
Sam Young wants to work. Standing in his sparsely decorated bedroom on a rainy afternoon in early January, Young, a 6-foot-6 senior forward for top-ranked Pittsburgh, is explaining how he composes poetry, his second love after basketball. "Flick off the lights, turn on some music, sit right there and just let it flow," he said, pointing to the computer on his desk. "I tell people, 'Just give me a topic and I'll write a poem for you.'"
Tuba Sahaab looks nothing like a warrior. She is a slight girl of 11, living in a simple home in a suburb of Islamabad. But in Tuba's case, looks are deceiving.
When Barack Obama is sworn in as president January 20, there will be music -- by, among others, Aretha Franklin, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and the U.S. Marine Band. There will be prayers and speeches -- including Obama's inaugural address. And for the fourth time in the nation's 56 inauguration ceremonies, there will be poetry -- by someone far less well-known.
The multitalented, multitasking screenwriter behind Clint Eastwood's new film also created the influential sci-fi series Babylon 5 and writes, in his spare time, for Marvel Comics
It's billed as the oldest writers' conference in the nation, a gathering at a picturesque mountaintop retreat where literary giants, book editors and up-and-coming novelists have been coming together once a year since the 1920s.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) ---- Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died on Saturday in Houston. He was 67.
In a small independently owned coffee shop on the corner of one of Atlanta's urban pockets, a group of would-be poets come together at open mic night for an evening of poetry and rhymes.
Kay Ryan is the latest pick as the nation's top poet. If her predecessors are any guide, she'll have an exhausting year
"We send little poems to each other," says his Marley & Me costar Alan Arkin
Quick, finish this sentence: "I am a ________."
The transformation in his country that Bertie Ahern presided over may have, in the end, helped bring about his downfall
Tito Mukhopadhyay shuffles to the front door of his home in Austin, Texas. He's coming home from school, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
It's 8 p.m. on a Friday, and a fashionable group of men and women is sitting around the pewter bar at Proof on Washington, D.C.'s G Street. "Do you cook?" asks a 30-something lawyer with shaggy black hair as she tilts a glass of red wine toward the guy next to her. "If my apartment had come without a kitchen," he replies with a grin, "I wouldn't have noticed." Everyone laughs knowingly.
Artists and other creative types are having their way with hotel rooms -- and they're thinking way outside the box.
The former Punky Brewster star and husband Jason Goldberg now have two daughters
If you're having trouble coming up with original expressions of love for your sweetheart, why not lift a line or two from the Internet?
Scottish people the world over celebrate the life of Robert Burns in an annual gathering full of whisky, poetry and haggis
The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear an appeal from poet Amiri Baraka, whose controversial poem about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to the elimination of an honorary post he held as New Jersey's poet laureate.
Last week I found myself overwhelmed by phone calls, text messages and e-mails, all asking me the same question: Is Etan going to be all right?
They say that truth is stranger than fiction. And while we're not exactly sure when that phrase was coined, we're guessing it was after reading about these guys and gals.
The house in East Hollywood where the novelist spent his pivotal years is under threat of demolition. Will Los Angeles save it?
A new initiative revives one of the great literary controversies: that the Bard was not who we think he was
Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84.
Most people remember Soleil Moon Frye as little Punky Brewster - but she's all grown up and has a little one of her own: daughter Poet Sienna Rose, whom she and husband Jason Goldberg welcomed in 2005.
Edward Falco is aware not just of the shock and mourning that have descended upon the campus of Virginia Tech, but he is also aware of the guilt and second-guessing afflicting students and faculty.
With its diligence and reverence for record keeping, baseball is often held up as an exact science. Ted Williams chose to play on the last day of the 1941 season because .39955 -- his batting average that morning -- was not actually .400. The discovery in 1977 of an overlooked RBI for Hack Wilson in his record 1930 season was akin to scientists finding a new element, and thus made sacred the number 191.
The cherubic face of Daisuke Matsuzaka bears a mysterious contentment, the calm self-assuredness of a kid who knows something you don't, who knows the questions before the exam is given. It's as if the pitching gods have let him in on a great secret, and it's safe with the chosen one.
The Doors last played the Sunset Strip's Whisky a Go Go on August 21, 1966, and lead singer Jim Morrison's rebellious, shamanistic shouts burned memories into the audience.
The Louvre is inviting slam poets into its gilded galleries to rap about paintings. If that seems unusual, it is. With Toni Morrison as guest curator this month, the museum is dreaming up new ways to look at art.
He is already acknowledged as the world's worst poet, Scotland's other national bard (Robert Burns being the pretender) is now set to claim a new title, the world's worst playwright. Literary aficionados will be horrified to learn that a long forgotten play by William McGonagall will be published next month.
In 1990, things were coming together for John Barr. He'd left Morgan Stanley to launch Barr Devlin, an investment bank specializing in utility mergers. Around the same time, he recalls, "a voice ca...
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has unveiled a softer image in the run-up to his bid to win a third term of office on December 3. Here's all you need to know about the Latin American firebrand.
No one strays into Castine. It's not on the way to anyplace, and it contains only a handful of shops. But in this almost-too-perfect New England town, you can stroll shaded sidewalks past classic Federal houses as a historic church bell tolls in the distance. On a fine fall day in Maine, everything here dazzles, from the white houses to the indigo bay sliced with white sails.
The way his prosecutor recalls it, William Richard Bradford literally scared jurors into giving him the death penalty 18 years ago.
When adults review children's books, they often focus on the simplicity of the language. Or the beauty of the artwork. Or the appropriateness of the subject matter.
Britain's young Princes William and Harry are fans of "American Pop Idol" and "Friends" and argue with their father Prince Charles over the TV remote control, they have revealed in an interview.
An advertising executive once noted, "People forget how fast you did a job -- but they remember how well you did it." Columbia University professor James Shapiro is reminding us how quickly a certain job was done.
The body of Coretta Scott King was laid to rest Tuesday night after a funeral attended by presidents, poets and graying veterans of the civil rights movement she helped lead after her husband's assassination.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed," wrote the English poet, painter and mystic William Blake, "everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." And two of the nominated works in the Grammys' best choral performance category -- one of them a setting of Blake's visionary writings -- give voice to that concept.
The Scene talks to Polish film director Pawel Pawlikowski about growing up in communist Warsaw and returning to the city for inspiration.
The election that made him famous, he didn't win; Lyndon Johnson did, 49 percent to 42 percent, in New Hampshire's 1968 Democratic presidential primary. But Eugene McCarthy, who died last week at 89 in Washington, had scared the sitting President by articulating a principled opposition to the Vietnam War and corralling enough idealists to turn vexation into votes.
As a child at the White House, Caroline Kennedy got early lessons in the power of words.
Admit it: you feel guilty about the lightweight stuff you read in summer.
Airdate: May 7th, 2005
In the predawn darkness of a Saturday in 2003, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looks out the upper-story windows of his enviably grand London home and sees a burning plane streak across the sky: ''Above the usual deep and airy roar is a straining, choking banshee sound growing in volume -- both a scream and a sustained shout, an impure, dirty noise.''
Hightone records has been serving up a rich gumbo of blues, country, gospel, and Texas swing for the past two decades. The Oakland-based label hit the national scene in 1986 with Robert Cray's cros...
Saul Williams isn't out to save hip-hop, but he is out to elevate the art form. The actor, activist and leader of the self-described "industrial punk-hop" movement, is effectively breaking boundaries while blurring the lines between poetry and rap.
Putting off dashing to the mall while grumbling all the way? Worried about soaring bills?
And to think, they're just parts of plants, their oils, their chemicals. Nothing more than that.
A New Economy champion, a lover of the Texas picker poets who write lovesick country songs...and, oh, by the way, a member of the Federal Reserve system for 36 years.
The 9/11 Commission Report is one of the finalists for the prestigious National Book Awards, a rare appearance for a government report.
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein spends his time in solitary confinement writing poems, tending a garden, reading the Koran and eating American muffins and cookies, a British newspaper has reported.
A senior al Qaeda leader -- described as the group's "chief of operations in the Arabian Peninsula" -- was killed in a shootout in Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials have told CNN.
Until last year, when they published an enormous bestselling hit by an unknown child poet, Cheryl and Peter Barnes were best known for producing children's books like Nat, Nat, The Nantucket Cat. H...
In a luxuriant private courtyard garden on the east side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood known long ago for its turtle population and known now for its celebrity inhabitants, writer E.B. White had ...
S.W. Erdnase was the pseudonym of Milton Franklin Andrews, a card cheat, confidence man, and murderer. He shot himself and his girlfriend in 1905 in San Francisco when police busted into his apartm...
The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks Oxford University Press, 690 pages
The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. Bass Henry Holt, 309 pages
Comedy clubs were booming as the curtain lifted on the 1990s. But it's no laughing matter on the club scene anymore. Comedy has crashed, and is being routed by blues clubs and a revival of performa...
IN THE DAYS of misty towers, distressed maidens, and stalwart knights, a young man, walking down a road, came upon a laborer fiercely pounding away at a stone with hammer and chisel. The lad asked ...
SUBJECT SEARCH Each word at the bottom of the page is the name of a subject you can study in college (if some are unfamiliar to you, look them up in the dictionary.) There is only one way to fit al...
BUSINESS POETRY? Isn't that a contradiction in terms -- the literary analogue of military music? Isn't business by its very nature too prosaic to beget poems? After all, when Walt Whitman sang, he ...
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