Once upon a time, in a land I’d like to visit for dessert—before Skinny Cow and Tasti D-Lite and before America came along and voted plain old vanilla its favorite flavor year after year after year—ice cream was serious stuff. It was so serious, in fact, that people believed it could be deadly. Though sharbat, a fruity drink served over snow or ice, existed in the Middle East in medieval times, the Western world was slow to catch on. Hundreds of years later, Europe was still in thrall to the lingering Hippocratic idea that “suddenly throwing the body into a different state” by ingesting something

Tom Waits once wrote a two-line poem that summed up his attitude toward life as a public figure: “I want a sink and a drain / And a faucet for my fame.” This couplet might seem disingenuous for a performer whose cult-hero career has made little showing on the pop charts, yet Waits has inspired cover hits by the likes of the Eagles, Rod Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen and garnered two Grammy wins and an Oscar nomination (for scoring Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 film, One from the Heart, a sink and a drain of sorts). He has also made it to the silver screen himself, usually playing, without much

It is part of Robert Ryman’s legend that he is a self-taught artist. He moved to New York in 1952, at age twenty-two, to pursue a career in jazz. A year later, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard. Paintings had begun to interest him “not so much because of what was painted but how they were done. I thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to look into—how the paint worked and what I could do with it.” So he bought some art supplies and began to experiment. At no point, then or later, did he try to depict anything—a face, a figure, a natural object like a

“I was bereft of human contact and exchange. What was going on in the outside world? No echoes reached me. I was suspended in limbo, unknowing, unreached.” Ruth First’s powerful, spare account of her four-month solitary confinement in 1963 under South Africa’s ninety-day detention law is a personal memoir, but it also serves as a group portrait of a movement. Folded into the meticulous details of her internment—interrogations; the sounds, smells, and routines of prison life; impressions of the guards; the effects of deprivation and psychological torture on her active mind—are the stories of

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country's most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.

"Who Is Mark Twain?" — a collection of 24 previously uncollected stories and essays drawn mostly from the vast archive of the author's papers and correspondence at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library — is an entertaining reminder of why that's so.

Not only are computer-based works largely missing from histories of twentieth-century art, it is often hard to avoid the impression that blatant ignorance (as well as, sometimes, nonchalance) about the past reigns even among the artists, gallerists, and critics promoting such art today. One may always claim, of course, that digital art is still a newcomer yet to be embraced by the art world, but there is a considerable body of works, ideas, and theories that has been largely neglected by art curricula, critical discourses, and dominant institutions alike. As a consequence, contemporary digital