Missing a film screened by UCLA’s film club The Crank could mean missing your only chance to ever see it. The Crank, which refers to both old hand-cranked cameras and cranky film connoisseurs, is made up of 10 graduate students in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s critical studies program. Read more...

From Antigone to student strikers in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, history remembers the conscientious objector who, though misunderstood at the time, eventually becomes a symbol of idealistic sacrifice. Read more...

As much as they’d like to convince you otherwise, spending all that time in the tub didn’t leave Bert and Ernie squeaky clean. Everyone remembers Jim Henson’s lovable Muppets as the stars of “The Muppet Show,” “Fraggle Rock,” and of course, “Sesame Street,” but the contributions of Big Bird and Kermit the Frog go far beyond comic hijinks and teaching the alphabet. Read more...

Correction appended In the world of art, like many professions, being a woman isn’t always easy. Most paintings by female artists fetch lower prices than those of their male counterparts, and female artists’ work represents only a small fraction of art being sold at prestigious auctions, according to a 2005 New York Times article. Read more...

While DJing for Berkeley college radio station KALX for over a decade, music journalist Oliver Wang took satisfaction in knowing that he was sharing music with a mass audience. Read more...

Built to Spill has been in hiatus since its last release in 2001, at work on arguably its most serious compositional work yet, “You in Reverse.” Singer/guitarist Doug Martsch takes a guitar-heavy path on this album, his voice muted and musical abstractions asked to speak for themselves with tiny sparks of illumination by the words. Read more...

Calexico is one of the few bands still around that writes “folk music” in its original sense ““ the Arizona-based group absorbs the character of the culture around it and, with an eye on both local and national tradition, makes music that is not intended for commercial success, but is rather a portrait of a unique place and time. Read more...