Arts & Life

Photo Jessica Biel in “The Sinner.” Credit Brownie Harris/USA Network Jessica Biel plays against type as a seemingly normal young wife and mother with a latent violent streak. And “Obit” follows the obituary team at The New York Times as it commemorates the dead. What’s on TV THE SINNER 10 …

Photo A typewriter Ernest Hemingway used, displayed in his former home in Ketchum, Idaho. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant will help to preserve the house. Credit Matt Cilley/Associated Press A literacy program on American military bases, an effort to revitalize Native American languages, a four-part TV documentary about …

Yes, it’s August, in all its fire and fetor, and maybe you’d rather be at the beach. But new productions opening in New York this month offer consolation and stimulation (and essential air-conditioning) to those staying in the city. They include sharp-minded considerations of matters political, from Suzan-Lori Parks and …

The Beierwaltes are also suing the antiquities directorate in Lebanon as part of a federal lawsuit in which they argue that neither the Lebanese government nor Manhattan prosecutors have offered convincing proof that the item was stolen. The lawsuit also cites property rights, cultural patrimony laws, statutes of limitations and …

He has the intelligence to pull off a novel of this size but lacks, somehow, the killer instinct — the ability to move in for intensities of feeling and thought and action. He’s written a lukewarm book that seems far longer than its 383 pages. Consuming it is like being …

As for that story that “Ink” promises to unfold, it’s about the overhaul nearly five decades ago of a London newspaper called The Sun from a drowsy nonentity into a tabloid sensation. A newspaper? How very anachronistic. Yet Mr. Graham’s account has tentacles that reach into the deepest recesses of …

The partnering of Ms. Biel with a character capable of savage violence seems felicitous as she strives to stretch professionally. Ms. Biel, now 35 and the mother of a 2-year-old, Silas, said she had been “desperately looking for something that would push me creatively to places that I have never …

“I wasn’t going to sit here and tell a story about very real issues,” namely sexual violence against women in Indian Country, “and cast people to portray characters in that world suffering those burdens and not have some connection,” Mr. Sheridan, who is not Native American, told me. He hired, …

Photo From left, Orlagh Cassidy, Sam Lilja and Brontë England-Nelson in “Acolyte,” part of the Summer Shorts mini-festival at 59E59 Theaters. Credit Carol Rosegg Ayn Rand’s life was so extraordinary it was made to be fictionalized. Graham Moore did just that in his one-act play “Acolyte,” which revolves around Rand’s …

Photo Mr. Burgerman’s primary technique is to overlay doodles onto scenes of everyday life in New York, adding a stylized bird into the lap of a distracted subway rider, say, or sketching a quick pair of faces onto a bunch of bananas. Credit Ben Ritter for The New York Times …