On Friday, the streaming service Netflix unveils the entire first season — all 13 episodes — of its newest children's series, called Julie's Greenroom. It stars Julie Andrews, who also is its executive producer along with her daughter, children's book author Emma Walton Hamilton.
New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman's new novel, The Idiot, follows a young woman's first year at Harvard University, and how she finds love through email.
Shirey mixes dry vocals with multi-instrumentalist stylings on his new album. Critic Milo Miles says A Bottle of Whiskey and a Handful of Bees is an original and engaging work.
One morning in early March, I got into my car and drove to see the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia. The graveyard is 20 minutes from my house. It's filled with the remains of Jewish Philadelphians, the majority of them from the 19th century.
The new film, Get Out, defies easy classification. Though it has funny moments, it's primarily a horror film, with racial anxiety at its center. Writer-director Jordan Peele tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he thinks of Get Out as a "social thriller."
Monk Dreams, Hallucinations and Nightmares, by the Finish-born pianist and composer, is a meditation on Thelonious Monk's "odd but catchy melodies," says jazz critic Kevin Whitehead.
You might say that Heretics, a sprawling novel by celebrated Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, has been in the works since the early 1990s. It was back then that Padura began writing a series of books featuring an ex-police detective in Havana named Mario Conde. Funny and philosophical, Conde, like the sharpest of detectives, devotes more time to investigating the mysteries of his own society than he does to investigating crime.
Peter W. Galbraith is a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, and is now professor of national-security studies at the National War College in Washington, D.C. Since the late 1980s he has been studying Iraqi war crimes and has also worked closely with the Kurds, who control a small territory in northern Iraq. He'll talk about the effect of a war on the Kurdish people.
His story in the April edition of the magazine is "A Tale of Two Colonies." Kaplan traveled to Yemen and Eritrea to investigate how the war on terrorism is forcing the United States to be involved with each. Yemen is believed to have the largest al Qaeda presence outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Kaplan is best known for his book Balkan Ghosts, which former President Clinton turned to before the U.S. involvement in the Bosnian crisis.
The film tells the story of an emotionally shut-down man who gradually learns that the events of his past are not as he remembers. David Edelstein says the movie, unlike the book, is a "non-event."
Journalist Emily Bazelon says the relationship between Bannon and Sessions predates the 2016 campaign, and that their anti-immigration policies come from fears of a growing minority population.
Author Mohsin Hamid's new novel, Exit West, is about knowing when it's time to flee your country, and what happens when you migrate to a nation that's hostile to immigrants. It's a topic the author himself is personally familiar with.
Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead remembers Mengelberg, who died Friday, as a "musical anarchist" who taught classical counterpoint and wrote dozens of catchy melodies.
Last week, when news surfaced about various meetings between the Russian ambassador and members of Donald Trump's campaign, Huffington Post editor Howard Fineman appeared on MSNBC and said, "If you think the Russian ambassador is just an ambassador, you haven't been watching The Americans."
In 1944, World War II was dragging on and the Nazi forces seemed to be faltering. Yet, in military briefings, Adolf Hitler's optimism did not wane. His generals wondered if he had a secret weapon up his sleeve, something that would change the war around in the last second.
Critic Ken Tucker reviews the British group The xx's third album. "Beneath its sleek beauty, there's a fresh joyousness ... that at its best is something close to inspirational," he says of I See You.
In 2009, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar was shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan while co-piloting an Air National Guard medevac helicopter. Though she was wounded in her rifle arm, Hegar managed to return fire while hanging onto a moving helicopter, which saved the lives of her crew and her patients.
