When I interviewed Chely Wright in 2005 for a book I was writing on country music and politics, she was a hero to the right and pariah to the left. And not tremendously happy about that. More than any other entertainer except Toby Keith -- and you'd have...

Is Nick Jonas still aiming his act at the Jonas Brothers' target teen-'n'-tween audience... or at their parents? That's the question you might ask after hearing the youngest JoBro's first solo album, Who I Am. ("Solo" may or may not need an asterisk next to it, since the billing for...

You might have thought that the horror-captured-on-videotape genre was all played out, after The Blair Witch Project gave way to the diminishing returns of Cloverfield, Rec, Diary of the Dead, Quarantine, and other thrillers purportedly pieced together from amateur footage shot by the victims of monsters, zombies, and wraiths. You...

"It's the altitude," friends always say when we e-mail home from the Telluride Film Festival, raving about the slate of prestige films, many of which will be arriving in the lower climes of America this fall or winter. But even back home on the coast, in the clear light of...

Up in the Air, one of this year's most anticipated movies for grown-ups, had its world premiere this weekend... up in the air. More specifically, the George Clooney vehicle made its bow 9,545 feet above sea level, in a screening room at the Telluride Film Festival that is accessible primarily...

When you encounter a talented celebrity who is advancing a bit in years and is clearly Not Quite In His Right Mind, there is always that hope that the star's eccentricities belie the kind of lovable dottiness and refusal to give a whit that can come with age... as opposed...

Not since I saw Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner go at each other in an excellent production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and...

How "Twitteriffic" is the new Facebook redesign? Imagine that Apple panicked over the press the Google G1 phone was getting last fall and abruptly decided to remake the iPhone in the image of its upstart competitor--dropping the most desirable features and adopting the G1's bigger bulk, smaller screen, skimpy memory,...

Country radio isn't always known for its daring social relevance, but two singles that are currently rising up the charts--John Rich's politically themed "Shutting Detroit Down" and Jamey Johnson's pharmaceutically themed "High Cost of Living"--prove that the genre that bills itself as "America's music" can still provide bracing jolts of...

You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, to quote one 1960s teen idol of some renown. And as I use my friends' Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds as my gauge to forecast the national mood, I can't help but noticing the sense of...

When I interviewed Joaquin Phoenix on and off the set of Walk the Line a few years ago, there was one thing he couldn't have been clearer on: You'd never find him pursuing a music career. "I liked playing guitar, but it's like everything that I do," he explained, as...