When a quartet from The Philadelphia Orchestra (my home town) recently found itself grounded on a plane at the Beijing airport, they decided after three long hours (in coach!) that enough was enough. It was time to provide musical relief to passengers sharing in their fatigue and frustration.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve shown you vintage footage of 1906 San Francisco (before and after the devastating earthquake), 1927 London, 1930s Havana, and New York City circa 1889-1906. Now, let’s do the time warp again and revisit the street life of Belle Époque Berlin.

In the matter of a month, a group called Northern Imagination raised $127,000 on Kickstarter, the amount needed to fund the building of a statue dedicated to the inventor Nikola Tesla in Silicon Valley.

Philip Roth announced his retirement from the writing life last fall, a few months shy of his 80th birthday. Now, on a computer in his New York City apartment, hangs a Post-It note that reads, “The struggle with writing is over.” There won’t be another novel. There won’t be a 29th.

Located in the Montparnasse section of Paris, the Idem studio was originally built by the printer Emile Dufrenoy in 1880, as a space to house his lithographic presses.

Patrick Stewart came to Comicpalooza (aka The Texas International Comic Convention) as a special guest. It’s not hard to imagine why, especially given his roles on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men film series.

If you watch enough commencement speeches, if you gather the collective wisdom of people who “have made it” in life, you start to see a trend. The key to life isn’t being smarter than the rest, though that doesn’t hurt.

Spider-Man, he was apparently a Protestant. The Hulk, a lapsed Catholic. Thor, a worshipper of a Teutonic deity. The X-Men, an assemblage of Catholics and Episcopalians. And Stanley Lee, the creator of these famous comic book figures, he’s Jewish.

Simon James, an artist living and working in London, has a penchant for taking albums and envisioning them as vintage Penguin & Pelican-style books. So far, he has covered The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, The Cure and Kraftwerk. And now comes his favorite band, Radiohead.

A little while back, we gave you  The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959.