Arts & Life

Mr. Blum, a 48-year-old Hollywood producer, takes this stand even though he thinks that goose bumps about Donald J. Trump have buoyed Blumhouse, his hit factory that has made “Get Out,” “Sinister,” “Insidious,” “The Purge,” “Paranormal Activity,” “Split,” “The Gift” and “The Visit.” Blumhouse also produced the Oscar-winning “Whiplash” and …

Starting in the early 1940s, Monk became a major architect of the style known as bebop — and, immediately, an iconoclast within it. He helped devise its language of thick harmonies, zipping melodies and steamed-up rhythm. But Monk maintained a rough piano style and wrote tunes to reflect it; his …

After crossing McGuinness Boulevard into the quieter, more traditionally Polish area, he paused before a bland beige apartment building on Diamond Street. “I feel like I lived here for three weeks, after college,” he said, studying the building before deciding it was the wrong place. Photo Mr. Batmanglij Credit Adrienne …

He evoked duende perhaps most fully in his “Gypsy Ballads,” published in 1928. It’s a canonical book in Spain. Here was a highly cultivated poet reworking Andalusian folk culture and myth. The high-low effect was startling. It was as if Robert Lowell had made a murderous little book that drew …

New York is a city of landmarks: world famous skyscrapers, grand monuments and cultural icons. But many of its must-see places each came shockingly close to becoming something completely different, some for better, some for worse. Visiting the sites of these remarkable unbuilt schemes can heighten the enjoyment of touring …

The Stanford Literary Lab, founded in 2010 by Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers, uses computer analysis to detect hidden patterns in literary texts by “reading” hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of them at a time. Here are a few findings from the new book “Canon/Archive,” which collects 10 of the lab’s …

It’s a question that draws heated answers. Digital humanities has been accused of fetishizing science, of acting as a Trojan horse for the corporate forces threatening the university, and worse. A recent broadside in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Digital-Humanities Bust” took a bludgeon to the field’s revolutionary …

“It is, if you can be objective about it,” he said a few weeks ago, sitting in his home here near the Pacific Ocean. Photo Mr. Hamill at home in Malibu with the family dog, Millie. Credit Ture Lillegraven for The New York Times Finding that inner peace took Mr. …

Photo Denis O’Hare in “Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive.” Credit Liane Brandon/PBS PBS’s “American Masters” sheds new light on Edgar Allan Poe. And a marathon of the “Treehouse of Horror” specials on “The Simpsons” brings nostalgia. What’s on TV AMERICAN MASTERS: EDGAR ALLAN POE: BURIED ALIVE 9 p.m. on PBS …

How to prevent flattening cultural context while encouraging foreign audiences to embrace the unfamiliar? Ms. Hasegawa tackles that question in “Japanorama.” Having previously presented Japanese contemporary art in Brazil, Britain and Germany, she “looked very carefully at the past 10-15 years: what was organized, what kind of Japanese contemporary art …