Talking to Nicola Benedetti can feel like an exercise in converting from dog to human years. Such is the case with someone who was so promising a violinist at age four that she was training under the best exponents in the world, including one of her idols, Yehudi...

This Saturday, "Star Wars VI: Return Of The Jedi," the capstone of George Lucas' original trilogy, turns 30. Not only does this mean you're old, it means it's time to consider precisely 30 things Lucas and his wildly successful franchise introduced into the world. Some (incest kiss) aren't...

Depending on whom you ask, Andy Kaufman either died on this day 29 years ago, or he sure fooled us. As evidence for the latter, they'll point to his career. Not the obvious one -- his "Taxi" gig or his quick-flaming stint on "Saturday Night Live" (which ended with the...

Even members of the press were dressed to kill, it was that kind of an affair. Long-necked women in high buns sat holding paddles alongside men in suits. Stage left, phone bidders manned calls from Russia, Italy, China, Germany. Salma Hayek, Toby Maguire, Bradley Cooper, and Mark Ruffalo all held...

Remember when the Museum of Modern Art, an entity devoted to art and design, decided to raze the iconic building next door in the name of expansion, and people pointed out the seeming conflict? The New York Times reports today that after a month marked by

They "didn't come with soundtracks,” the author Mohsin Hamid recently mused in an essay on why he came to love novels. Readers of them, unlike movie watchers, "got more of the source code -- the abstract symbols we call letters and words -- and assembled more of the...

A Kazakh artist born without arms, who was reportedly denied entry into the UK this spring for the surreal official reason that his fingerprints were of “poor quality,” may get in after all. Scroll down for a slideshow of his work.

“We’re engaging with the applicant to resolve...

Yesterday’s Wired profile tells the futuristic story of Artaic, a company hoping for “world mosaic domination,” by way of a robot that builds cheaper, faster mosaics than even factories in China and India. For anyone following the creep of robots into the so-called creative industries --...

Black men and women have built practically every musical tradition in the West: jazz, blues, rock and roll, funk. But when it comes to classical music, both onstage and in the crowd, they're few and far between.

Probing the question of why this is inevitably leads to the odds-defying...

This is the first in a series on technological disruptions in the entertainment industry. With this series, the Huffington Post will track the way television, film, and other institutions are shifting to accomodate innovations, and how these changes affect audiences.

Vines, videos made via the same-named...

No one understood why a Santa Monica High School student killed himself one January afternoon in 2011, leaping from the roof of a 10-story hotel as his teammates from the school baseball team watched in horror from a field across the street. He wasn’t “the kind of person you would...

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be jailed indefinitely in China, now’s your chance to see. British director Howard Brenton’s new play “#aiweiwei: The Arrest Of Ai Weiwei” brings to life the Chinese artist’s recollection of the 81 days he spent in a 12′ by 24′...

“Hey random stranger, hold this sign I made,” wrote one Redditor Tuesday, trying to make sense of “To Boston. From Kabul. With Love.” The photo essay that has been circulating online depicts Afghans holding a handwritten sign with the titular message handwritten in black. Scroll down...

Last week, we reported on the Museum of Modern Art's decision to raze the neighboring ex-Folk Art Museum, a narrow building widely considered one of the architectural triumphs of this century. This week brings more hopeful news: people are agitating.

So far two

On this point, Sam Stermer and Sima Dodyk are clear: they have nothing but warm feelings for the lightless caves their families squatted in for years. Burrowing was a way to evade the German soldiers descending on their Ukrainian town on the hunt for Jews like them. Underground, Stermer and...

Sad but not quite shocking news. Museum of Modern Art officials announced plans yesterday to tear down the American Folk Art Museum, a sliver of a building to its right once awarded the title, "Best Building In The World," in a bid to expand.

The...

When Frank Gehry's latest tower rose out of lower Manhattan in all its rippled steel glory in early 2011, architecture critics basically died, they were so happy. In a review titled "A Downtown Skyscraper For A Digital Age," New York Times critic Nicholas Ourossoff saw in...

Given that Margaret Thatcher breathed her last in the London Ritz Hotel yesterday, we're due a round of a dark guessing game. That old “rule of threes thing,” as Jimmy Fallon put it during a “30 Rock” cameo, needs satisfying.

Of course, "30 Rock"...

Political memoirs aren't usually good reading. D.C.'s finest tend to keep their ghostwriters on a tight leash with the aim of image control, not gorgeous prose.

But Hillary Clinton's books seem to be unusually bad! That is, according to the critics (audiences, however, love her). Yesterday's news...

Most critics don’t get the chance to review a movie they helped write. Then again, Roger Ebert wasn’t most critics. Ebert, who died today of cancer, may be best known for flashing his thumbs with Gene Siskel and posting immaculate analyses at his Chicago Sun-Times blog, but he’s...