We, the Living Colson Whitehead’s new novel Zone One pits humans against zombies in a harrowing future New York City. With its wry perspective and beautifully-wrought prose, it’s also Whitehead's love letter to the city of his birth, a place beloved “even with her eyes blackened and her teeth...

Spielberg on the high dive The three-time Oscar-winning director who once observed that “I was born a nervous wreck” is at the helm of not one but two big holiday films. Writing in The New York Times, Michael Cieply finds they're  movies whose creator and characters have at least one thing...

Fear & loathing with HST Johnny Depp recalls his first encounter with Hunter S. Thompson: “...I see the door spring open, and I see sparks! I realized there was a large-ish, three-foot cattle prod and a Taser gun, and the sea began to part — people were leaping and hurling themselves out of...

UK: Bard wars The Roland Emmerich film Anonymous (starring Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave) opens on Friday; it’s sure to further the long debate over whether William Shakespeare ever really wrote the plays he’s credited for. In England, towns and Bard scholars have been protesting the film’s revisionist...

Moscow: An American in Russia Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov famously went in the other direction, of course — from Russia to the West. But on Nov. 4, South Dakota native and most recently New Yorker David Hallberg, breaks in with the celebrated Bolshoi Ballet as its first foreign principal...

Pardon the disappearance When in the course of human events it’s necessary to take a break … you take one. A long one. To tend to family business. To recharge the batteries. To think about how to make this thing better. We’re back, and hoping you will be to...