Artist John Baldessari has designed a curiously dopey iPhone app that allows a user to rearrange most of the objects in a 17th century still life painting called Banquet Still Life, by Abraham van Beyeren.  Looking at this mess of a Dutch painting is like being beaten about the eyes with a hammer.  But Baldessari [...]

The traditional notion of where fairy tales come from suggests that people like the Brothers Grimm listened to oral folktales handed down through the generations and wrote them down with little embellishments.  But now, in a book called Fairy Tales: A New History, Ruth B. Bottigheimer argues that fairy tales have a much more literary [...]

The last few Star Trek movies have been uniformly awful. But this new one looks very promising. I think it was a great idea to go back and redo the original show’s characters as they venture forth on their first mission together. The main hitch would be if the movie misses the sly humor that [...]