When Jerry Seinfeld called out, “Release the hounds,” he probably wasn’t imagining the extravaganza that is the Bryn Mawr Hound Show, held each year on the handsome grounds of the Radnor Hunt Club in Malvern, Pennsylvania. One of the largest such sporting events on the East Coast, it offers the hound enthusiast — what’s not to love? — a day with top packs of beagles, bassets, and foxhounds from all over the area.

The Greene Space's Shakepearean 'team'--Ricardo Fernandez, David Maclean, Sarah Montague, and Arthur Yorinks--are in London recording audio and video in anticipation of the Royal Shakespeare Company's forthcoming residency at the Armory, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Here are some notes from the field.

Is the pen mightier than the sword, or any number of other challenges? That’s what “A Working Day,” at the PEN World Voices Festival set out to explore on April 28.

Listen to the audio of a PEN World Voices Festival panel at the Standard Hotel. Writers and editors talked about the ways in which corporate publishing limited access to audiences, the pressure to mainstream, and editing as a form of censorship.

Reality. "Some people live in it, some people don't," observed Happy Ending host and curator Amanda Stern on Wednesday, May 4 at Joe's Pub before introducing three writers with different takes on the subject. The topic seemed a fitting flourish to a week that included both a fairy tale wedding and the death of an international terrorist—each event both fantastic and true.

Bloggers? Tweeters? My Space? Facebook? Fahgedabodit. Hundreds of years before everyone got on a digital soapbox, diarists used this intimate form to confide their loves, longings, and keen observations about the world around them. Learn more about the diaries currently on view at the Morgan Library here.

About blogging—I don’t.  To me this word suggests an action taken by something hairy with a club.

Think of me as a diarist, or an old-fashioned essayist, musing on that space that is somewhere between public and private, without any particular agenda.  The Charles Lamb of the audio set.  

One of the most powerful aspects of “War Horse,” which opened at Lincoln Center on April 14, is, of course, the astonishing puppets. At The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, the puppeteers pulled back the curtain during a lively panel discussion and demonstration.

It's fitting that William Shakespeare was born in the spring—April 26, 1564—because his sonnets are crammed with sumptuous images of ripe nature bursting its bounds. The Cornelia Street Café recently celebrated the playwright’s birthday with a reading of selected sonnets. 

The Pen World Voices Festival opens in New York on Monday. The annual event is a bold reminder that writing is not just a leisure art resulting in a commodity, but an instrument of change, a tool for probing everything from revolution to the human psyche, and a vital bridge between nations and individuals.

It is hard to imagine, now that radio is so pervasive, what a miracle it seemed when a confluence of discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the first broadcasts. 

The Handspring Puppet Company’s production of "War Horse" opened at Lincoln Center on Thursday night. The powerful adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel challenges notions of puppetry while teaching us about love and war.