Culture and Arts

This book reminds us how far we have come when there are more highly educated women everywhere than at any other time in history. Still unresolved is the question of friendships between women and men. The difficulty of engaging in this fashion is emphasized by the need repeatedly to declare to doubters that sex is not a component of such a relationship. more »

The exhibition, The Great N.C. Wyeth Caper: Paintings by America’s Storyteller, features six artworks that were the focus of the state's largest art heist and an 18-month criminal investigation. After the paintings were taken from a private collector’s home in Portland, Maine, four were removed from their frames and endured a perilous cross-country journey to a pawn shop in Beverly Hills, California, where they were identified and returned to authorities in December 2014. The remaining two paintings were recently recovered in the Greater Boston area, still in their original frames. more »

The young and audacious artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood revolutionized the British art establishment of the nineteenth century with their medievalist aesthetic. This National Gallery of Canada exhibition illustrates how John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and their fellow Pre-Raphaelites strove to uproot the Royal Academy teachings. Don't overlook the shop! more »

New York and Nevada have banned the sites, labeling the games illegal gambling — rulings that the sites are challenging. But many more states are working on legislation for upcoming sessions that would subject the games to oversight or licensing. California law has a "predominant purpose test," which determines an activity to be gambling if greater than 50 percent of the outcome is derived from luck. In New York, the state has something called the "material element test," which determines that the activity is one of chance, as long as chance plays a "material role" in the outcome. more »