The controversy over the Washington Redskins’ name and logo is flaring up again after recent high-profile criticism from sportscaster Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann, and even President Obama. And protestors are seizing the moment: they’ll be at the Metrodome on Thursday when that certain Washington football team plays the Vikings. But a look through the MIA  ...

This weekend, the MIA opens a must-see exhibition for photography fans: 31 Years: Gifts from Martin Weinstein, featuring a good chunk of the more than 500 photographs given to the MIA over the decades by the former trial attorney and current gallery owner, including greats like August Sander, Josef Ruzicka, W. Eugene Smith, and his  ...

“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...

Don’t get too excited. No one’s seriously talking about mermaids being real (well, Animal Planet is). But the two giant creatures that recently washed up on busy California beaches a few days apart may well be the source of all the old sea serpent stories. One was 18 feet long, the other 14 feet, long  ...

I grew up on my dad’s stories of Hindu gods—and on Marvel comics. There were other ingredients to life, obviously, but these are two that I channeled into writing “The Chronicles of Kalki,” the Vishnu installment of my Displaced Hindu Gods trilogy now playing at Mixed Blood Theatre. The trilogy displaces the Hindu trinity of  ...

He’s a poet for people who don’t think they like poetry, the rare poet who’s regularly featured in poetry journals and Esquire. He uses words like most people use a needle-nose pliers, to pry, wrench, twist, and argue their way into and out of things. Alex Lemon is a linguistic badass, and he’s reading tonight  ...

Tibet may be in turmoil, but monastic education—monks in saffron robes and shaved heads studying the ancient, esoteric ways of Tibetan Buddhism—hasn’t changed for 600 years. Until now. A New York Times story this week tells of a group of Tibetan monks engaged in an educational exchange of Eastern scholarship and Western scientific principles at  ...