Several characters together alone in a mansion, all with a hidden motivation to kill and one dead body: it’s formulaic, sure, but why fix what isn’t broken? Especially when it works well, as...

“I just thought I’d mention before we begin: This is not the Keith Urban concert. If you mean to be at a Keith Urban concert, you will be sorely disappointed.” So said lead singer Colin...

With an opening track titled “Particles or Waves,” alluding to quantum duality and other songs that make references to Greek mythology and philosophy, one may be tempted to say that The Honeydogs’...

Science and politics make poor bedfellows, particularly when the former is debated in the arena of the latter. The two major areas where the pairing seems particularly gruesome are evolution and climate...

As far as literary value goes, “Voices of the Dead,” a new pulpy revenge thriller by Peter Leonard, doesn’t have much to offer. The prose is terse, telling the reader exactly what’s...

As science progresses further and further along, it's remarkable how little we still understand about the big questions of consciousness, which are simple enough to ask, but downright confounding to...

The last word a physicist wants to hear at a cocktail party is “quantum.” The science of quantum mechanics has been so badly butchered and misrepresented by well-meaning writers, that others...

One of the most baffling philosophical questions of all time is why we’re here. Or, to put it another way, why is there anything instead of nothing at all? Why does the universe exist and if there’s...

With a watercolor painted album cover by Joe Sorren evoking early Joni Mitchell, one could be forgiven for thinking that Ingrid Michaelson’s latest album, Human Again, might be an artistic foray...

In the realm of ’90s alternative rock, few bands stand on the same tier as the Smashing Pumpkins. Led by guitarist and vocalist Billy Corgan, they produced a body of work epic in scope, focusing...

It’s the end of the semester and, though you promised yourself that this time would be different, you’ve let your work slide, and you’re not prepared for the final at all. Without a minute...

Music is a fairly subjective art form. A piece that somebody may love will leave someone else cold. It doesn’t transcend generations very well, with parents and children forever fighting over which...

The Largo on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles was a magical place — a small hole in the wall with terrible food, no comfortable seats and filthy restrooms that somehow managed to attract impressive...

“Metropolis” is one of those movies that any cineast should see before he or she dies. It’s a remarkable piece of work, released at the tail end of the silent period of cinema and featuring...

Why are you reading this article? It’s a simple question, but if there’s any truth to the findings of neuroscience, the answer you give is a justification by a part of your brain that had...

While scientists are out there working on the big questions like the nature of matter, the meaning of time and what dark energy is, they’re not working on the truly important questions that affect...

Randy Newman is something of an unconventional singer-songwriter. Aside from his voice, which only really works for Randy Newman songs, his songwriting is difficult to pigeonhole. While many know him for...

 Though The Decemberists released a few albums before Picaresque, that was the one that put them on the map. Strange and wonderful, the album began with whale songs and each track came up with new...

Physical media may be dying, but it’ll be a tragedy for the collector if it ever does. Sure, one could go to Amazon and download a digital copy of Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused,”...

With talk about neutrinos, bosons and muons, the field of particle physics often sounds less like science and more like something out of a Lewis Carroll poem. It’s not just that the field is abstract...

Ben Folds loves his fans, and if they needed any proof, they now have it in the form of his new release, The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective. Not content just putting together a simple “best-of”...

 Give a pretty girl a guitar and tell her sing to about heartache, and that seems like all you need to make a solid pop album. Or at least it seems that easy when that girl is Rachael Yamagata. Her...

Fairness isn’t always fair, but sometimes it can be interesting. “War of the Worldviews” pits two writers against each other, each with a different idea of what reality means and how...

Other than sex, few things are more interesting to humans than violence. We pay good money to watch gory movies and video games, deplore the acts of violence we see on the news (but still can’t...

Children often find themselves drawn to the sciences. Three-year-olds incessantly ask their parents a never-ending series of “whys,” only to be told over and over again to stop asking questions....

The mere mention of the name Richard Feynman causes any physicist’s eyes to brighten. No doubt, Feynman was one of greatest thinkers of the 20th century, but he never acted like one. He was a goofball...

Science has had a tough time in the popular media. On TV for instance, every “Cosmos,” “Mythbusters” or “Planet Earth” has about a dozen Fox specials about alien abductions,...

Rod Lurie’s remake of “Straw Dogs” makes many changes to Sam Peckinpah’s original, some of which improve the story and some that don’t make much of a difference. The biggest...

[Corrected Sept. 11: Changed Lauren Meyers title] Monster movies are scary, but they aren’t that scary. Sharks, snakes, spiders, mutant beasts — sure, they can kill you, but that’s about...

A man takes your hand, tells you to relax and then traces the lines on your palm to uncover the mysteries of your past, present and future. He tells you that you’re a kind person. That the line over...