In sixth grade, my friend Amy Osborn’s parents took us to a screening of Annie Hall. The bedroom scenes with Carol Kane, Janet Margolin and Diane Keaton were chaste by today’s standards. The repartee was so beyond my frame of reference, it caused but little discomfort.

Mother’s Day can elicit complicated emotions in the human animal. Not so Mother Hamster. While you were out to brunch, she was matter-of-factly devouring the runtiest of her litter. And not because he failed to present her with a bouquet and flowery card.

George Carlin was more than a Class Clown. He was also a class act, as evidenced by this undated missive to comedy writer Sally Wade, with whom he shared the final decade of his life. The man who once parsed the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television showered his “spouse without papers” with such notes daily.

Caslon, Baskerville, Helvetica… these names have graced many a pull down menu, but what do they signify, exactly?
Graphic designer Ben Barrett-Forrest spent 140 hours animating the 291 paper letters on display in the History of Typography, an introduction to the ways in which language has been expressed visually over time.

A couple of days ago, Mick Fleetwood told NPR that a band’s greatest hits belong to its fans “to be reinterpreted and create a backdrop for parts of their lives.

In 1987, Compuserve begatteth Image Format 87A.
Image Format 87A begatteth Graphics Interchange Format or GIF (rhymes with a certain brand of peanut butter, the video history above helpfully points out).

The relationship of movie star to critic isn’t always as parasitic and fraught as you might imagine. Witness Tilda Swinton bouncing around the Virginia Theater in Champaign Illinois, urging audience members to get up and dance in honor of the late Roger Ebert.

Remember that scene in Nashville, when Keith Carradine sings “I’m Easy,” and every woman in the club thinks he’s speaking directly to her?
Breaking the fourth wall—also known as direct address—can have the same effect on a filmgoing audience. The compilation video above makes it clear that actors love it too.

Few of us possess the physical strength and even steelier will to follow in the handprints of professional balancer Jaakko Tenhunen, but most of us have other projects that could benefit from the sort of relentless determination he brings to his work.

Would you take advice from William S Burroughs? What if it were filtered through the humanistic sensibilities of Patti Smith? Addressing the crowd at last summer’s Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the punk poetess shared some good counsel laid on her in her youth by the Beat’s highest priest.