This week, the art world was rocked by tragic news: the influential Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley died on Tuesday, an apparent suicide. The self-described “blue-collar anarchist” was born in Detroit, in 1954, and gave as much back to popular culture (including the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1992 album “Dirty”) as he borrowed (stuffed animals were to Kelley as paint was to Pollock). Kelley was often described—even dismissed, in the early days of his career— as a conceptual “bad boy,” a label he loathed, as he explained on camera in an episode of the documentary series Art:21 (video above); the show also featured a tour of Kelley’s 2005 installation “Day Is Done,” at Gagosian, in Chelsea, in which high-school shenanigans assume the proportions of the ninth circle of hell. Mike Kelley showed us dark corners of ourselves—and of America—that we might otherwise have been too uncomfortable to confront. His commitment to art and to truth was intense, intellectually rigorous, and clear-hearted— it’s unthinkable that his career has come to an end.

“An often overlooked fact about the golf market is that although there may be twenty-six million golfers in America, there are only five or six million obsessives—players who dream about golf, practice their swings whenever they pass a mirror, and yearn to buy, for example, magnetic insoles for their golf shoes,” David Owen wrote in the magazine, in 1999. Fortunately for those five or six million obsessives, technology has advanced far enough in the past decade to bring them PGA Tour HD, a free iPad app that covers the tour, well, obsessively: it features live tournament coverage, P.G.A. tour video, course statistics, and in-depth details on each player, including real-time performance metrics and even individual tee times.

A note at the end of Alan Lightman’s concise but ambitious novel, “Mr. g”—about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else—assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman, who is a theoretical physicist as well as a novelist, has an atypically data-driven approach to fiction; we learn early on that the invention of music involves “a scale with a fixed ratio of frequencies, generally 2 1/12, since exponential powers of that number came closest to ratios of small integers like 3:2 and 4:3.” This makes for an unusual yet charming account of work in the Void, with interference from Mr g’s squabbling relatives Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, and the suggestions of the slick, demonic Belhor, who advocates for free will. “Rationality and logic can be spiritual,” Mr g tells us, gently making Lightman’s point that religion and science are perfectly compatible.

A note at the end of Alan Lightman’s concise but ambitious novel, “Mr. g”—about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else—assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman, who is a theoretical physicist as well as a novelist, has an atypically data-driven approach to fiction; we learn early on that the invention of music involves “a scale with a fixed ratio of frequencies, generally 2 1/12, since exponential powers of that number came closest to ratios of small integers like 3:2 and 4:3.” This makes for an unusual yet charming account of work in the Void, with interference from Mr g’s squabbling relatives Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, and the suggestions of the slick, demonic Belhor, who advocates for free will. “Rationality and logic can be spiritual,” Mr g tells us, gently making Lightman’s point that religion and science are perfectly compatible.

When I tell people I review restaurants for a living, they reply, "You have the best job ever." Perhaps, but some folks have it even better: the friends and family who come with me to dinner. They reap the benefits of gluttony with no work required later. Yet my vegetarian buddies get the shaft o...

Stories vary, but nearly everyone agrees that the French dip was invented in Los Angeles around 1918. It coincided with a national craze for crusty French bread. Some say it started when a toothless old man wandered into a streetcar-terminal café and, seeing the baguette that the brisket s...

The pop-rock quartet Imperial Teen has been at it for almost two decades—the band’s superb début, “Seasick,” came out in 1996—and they’ve aged accordingly. Their songs have gone from slightly bratty, if instantly memorable three-minute masterpieces about parties, heartache, and gay life in America, to more mature, equally memorable versions of the same. The band’s fifth record, “Feel the Sound,” comes out this week, and from the driving “Runaway,” which has more hooks than a fishing hat and the best harmonies this side of Fountains of Wayne, to the quietly majestic closer, “Overtaken,” the album confirms the band’s status as one of pop music’s best-kept secrets.

Though best known for his musical comedies, the director Vincente Minnelli was also a master of melodrama who made one of the greatest inside-Hollywood stories. “The Bad and the Beautiful,” from 1952 (on TCM Monday, January 30th, at 2 P.M. E.T.), is constructed as a series of flashbacks to the turbulent career of a producer, Jonathan Shields (played by Kirk Douglas with panache and vehemence), who has fallen on hard times and whose former colleagues, feeling victimized, won’t work with him again. The cast includes Lana Turner, as an ingénue he turned into a star; Dick Powell, as a novelist whose book he made into a hit film; and Gloria Grahame, as the novelist’s wife. The set pieces (including one in which, in a matter of minutes, the producer transforms the actress from an extra to a star) vibrate with the energy, the invention, and the audacity that have fuelled generations of Hollywood myths into the present day.

Patricia Lockwood, whose “Love Poem Like We Used to Write It” appeared in the November 28 issue of the magazine, has close to four thousand followers on Twitter. That’s peanuts if you’re a pop star (@ladygaga has eighteen million and climbing), but for a poet, it’s pretty impressive. At the digital-art Web site Rhizome, Brian Droitcour has collected the best of Lockwood’s “sext” tweets, a genre she conceived in the wake of the Anthony Weiner scandal. Lockwood, who once told a reporter that she was ten years old when she wrote her first haiku, is a natural-born tweeter. A trio of examples below:

I am a mushroom in a forest. There are drops of dew all over my tip. Nabokov reaches down a hand to pick me

You are miniature, and I put you in the bell of a saxophone and play a long soulful B-flat

I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me

If a seventy-fifth anniversary is honored with diamonds, how to mark the hundred and fiftieth? The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s answer: with a blog celebrating the ways in which the institution has shaped the art scene in Brooklyn and beyond since it was founded, in 1861. The blog, which has been in beta until this week, documents the building’s history (including photos of its original home on Montague Street, which was destroyed in a fire in 1903), its avant-garde performances, and its relationship with the borough at large (check out the fascinating post on the cross-dressers of Dyker Heights).

“Jack Holmes and His Friend,” Edmund White’s latest novel, is the story of two young men—one gay, the other straight—who come of age in the sixties in literary New York. The book examines two unrequited passions: Jack’s love for Will, and Will’s literary ambitions, which end abruptly after a review demolishes his first novel. While Jack accepts his homosexuality—diffidently at first, enthusiastically later—Will settles into a monogamous suburban existence and then plunges into an affair; both his wife and his mistress are friends of Jack’s. In tender prose, White does justice to the erotic potential of the story, with abundant and charged descriptions of sex. Switching between Jack’s point of view and Will’s, White shows each man as he perceives himself and as he is perceived by his friend. The result is an elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships.

It's not every day you see a 4,000-pound oven flying three stories above Boerum Hill. But that's how Luca Arrigoni had to install the stove at Sottocasa, his new Brooklyn pizzeria.

The wood-fired beast had to be crane-...

In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the emperor stuck it to the czar. Japan tightened its grip on the Korean peninsula, and Korean refugees flooded Primorsky, the Russian maritime province to the north. Eventually, some transmigrated to far-off Uzbekistan and obtained work in the vast cot...

Bob Dylan tributes are nothing new—think of the soundtrack to “I’m Not There,” which included almost three dozen Dylan interpretations by the Black Keys, Yo La Tengo, Cat Power, and others. But “Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International” is especially ambitious. The four-disc set offers a slew of newly recorded versions of familiar songs, sometimes from surprising sources: KeSha’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is getting lots of ink, but Miley Cyrus is here, too, with a perfectly respectable “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” The roster of artists is impressively eclectic (Queens of the Stone Age, Lenny Kravitz, Bryan Ferry, Zee Avi, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Billy Bragg, Ziggy Marley, Airborne Toxic Event, Bad Religion, Band of Skulls), as is the list of Dylan songs they cover. Even if your favorite is a relative obscurity (“Property of Jesus,” “Senor”), it’s likely to be here.

One of the most audacious filmmakers of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski took a seventeen-year break from the movie business in 1989; “Essential Killing” (coming to DVD January 24th), from 2010, the second film since his return, is a fierce adventure tale that stars Vincent Gallo as a Taliban fighter who escapes from his Western captors and makes his way on a survivalist trek through the snowbound terrain of Eastern Europe. Richard Brody described it as “feral cinema”; he praised Skolimowski for filming “savage travails with an exciting yet chilling alternation between the grandeur of landscapes and the grit of intimate experience.”