Culture

Banks' long-delayed debut album arrived with a shrug, but this is less evidence of an artist failing to live up to her potential than of the still-crushing vagaries of the record industry.

The ones that scare us, the ones that take things away from us, and the ones that make us feel in control.

Two new films, Whiplash and Adult Beginners, make the same point: that real happiness means abandoning the obsessiveness required for greatness. Only one of them thinks this is a bad thing.

Before Catch-22 became a huge success, Joseph Heller wrote the play that he believed would make his fortune. Fifty years later, the lewd production has almost entirely been written out of his career.

Matthew L. Miller's "Can't You See It, I Am One" gallery show is a challenge to—and rejection of—one of the central tenets of self-portraiture: that the artist himself is the subject.

The revival of The Four Horsemen Project uses dance, projection, and immersive sound to answer a call made by avant-garde poets 30 years ago.

Oh, like you've never cancelled an album because of a bad ecstasy trip.

How Marvel, Netflix, and others harness the past and future to keep us immersed in an anticipatory, amnesic, spectacular now.

Lenny Bruce, First Amendment crusader, broke ground for arguably every significant comic in his wake. Laughing at his material can seem like a civic duty. But does it hold up?