Stewart Brand is an ambitious septuagenarian. The writer and environmental activist’s most recent project sounds like something out of Jurassic Park: he wants to bring back the extinct passenger pigeon. Brand is probably best-know as the editor of the landmark Whole Earth Catalog, a counter-culture ...

Thousands of people filled the lawn of the Michigan state capitol in Lansing this past Monday to watch female members of the state's house and senate perform The Vagina Monologues as a response to a ruckus in Michigan House of Representatives days earlier. Eve Ensler ...

WNYC listener Julie Bayley grew up watching daytime talk shows to catch comics like Rodney Dangerfield. But there weren’t any comedians like her: female and black. Then Bayley saw Whoopi Goldberg in her one-woman show on Broadway (it ran for 156 sold-out performances ...

Taryn Simon's photographs are crisp to the point of being stark, stripped of all but the most essential elements. She documents places and things that are normally kept far from view: items detained at customs, radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility, the art collection of the CIA. ...

Inspired by Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars, we want your poem about the star who captured your imagination — as a teenager or now. This week, we feature an entry in tribute to Led Zeppelin. ...

Enter our Ode to a Teen Idol Poetry Contest

New York City's East Village was once a vigorous and diverse community of poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman. A new audio tour of the neighborhood captures the characters, sounds, and memories ...

Sergio Muñoz was only seven years old when he became a devotee of the band Kiss. He discovered the Alive! album in Tower Records and was mesmerized by the cover. Isolated and lonely, a recent immigrant from Mexico, Muñoz connected to the band’s fantasy life ...

Video: Kiss, “Watching You”

Kehinde Wiley paints contemporary kings. His portraits are opulent collages that take young men and turns them into heroes and surrounding them with intricate, kool-aid-bright backgrounds. The World Stage: Israel, a new exhibition of Wiley's paintings, is now on view at The Jewish Museum ...