Education

Say you want to escape the doldrums of daily life — but you can’t quite afford a trip to Hawaii. Why not to head to your local tiki bar for a sample of the South Seas? These faux-Polynesian, palm-thatched rum palaces that were all the rage in the 1960s are now making a comeback. Leading this nouveau-tiki movement are Lost …

The guy in front of me, you know we were just chatting, because that’s what you do when you’re waiting in line for food, and he’s telling me secrets of how to get this pizza,” Cohen says. “And he turns to me and says, ‘I’m famous, you know?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, really? For what?’ And he tells me, …

For Star Trek’s George Takei, it was one of the worst predictions he ever made, and one of the best strokes of luck in his life: Takei, known to fans worldwide as helmsman Hikaru Sulu, originally thought the show would only last one season. “When we were shooting the pilot, Jimmy Doohan [who played engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott] said to …

Welcome to the third installment of Read, Watch, Binge! our summer recommendation series. As you may recall from our first list, we were tired of algorithms that only matched books to books or movies to movies. So this month, we’ve enlisted the help of real live humans to pair TV series with movies, musicals, books, comics, podcasts and more. (You …

Opera geeks are always charged with excitement, and a little anxiety, when a favorite singer releases a new album. (Has her voice changed? How will it fit the repertoire?) Netrebko, arguably today’s most touted soprano, is about to issue a new album, Verismo — and we’ve got a sneak peek. As her plush voice has added darker, richer colors over …

Many stylistic winds blow through the repertoire of The Westerlies. The unconventional brass quartet from New York (Riley Mulherkar and Zubin Hensler, trumpets; Andy Clausen and Willem de Koch, trombones) embraces jazz, classical, new music and dance — and in this case, puts a new spin on an old British ballad. “Pretty Saro,” as the song is best known, is …

Over more than 25 years, Eldridge has built a solid career as a singer, songwriter, pianist and teacher. All of those talents are in ample evidence in this original tune, on which he sings and plays piano and which opens his recently released album, Disappearing Day. He frames himself with smart and alluring accompaniment, including a sinuous bass line, smoky …

t was just two years ago that Mauritanian vocalist Noura Mint Seymali hit the international scene — but now, it’s hard to imagine the scope of African music without her. The singer and her band blow listeners away with giddily woozy and dreamlike vocals; blistering guitar played by her husband, Jeiche Ould Chighaly; and the grounding elements of Ousmane Touré’s …