Arts & Life

The original Veronica Mars premiered on television 15 years ago, which, in TV terms, was a whole different era. David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, which just reunited its cast for a fabulous TV movie, premiered that year. So did two major hits for ABC, Lost and Desperate Housewives.

More artists are telling the Whitney Museum of American Art they are withdrawing from the museum's high-profile Biennial contemporary art showcase currently underway in New York.

"It was a really easy decision," says artist Nicholas Galanin, who spoke by phone from Alaska, where he lives. Along with three other artists, he told the Whitney on Friday that he wanted his multimedia work pulled from the show.

Petra: It's Saturday! (Or actually, as we're posting this it's now Sunday) I feel the need to reiterate this, lest I forget what day it is or which direction is up! Saturday tends to be the day people bust out their best cosplays — I saw some truly amazing getups, including countless Deadpools (Deadspool?), a lot of women dressed as Loki and Doctor Strange, a really well-done armored Cersei Lannister, Missandei of Naath carrying her own head, and my personal favorite, Logan and Jessica from Logan's Run, complete with life-clocks in their palms.

Opera is an art form well-suited to big emotions and tragic stories, often set in the past. But a new opera, Blue, grapples with a more contemporary tragedy — the killing of an unarmed black man at the hands of a police officer.

Cartoonist Dylan Meconis's new book Queen of the Sea is set in a convent on a tiny island, somewhere off the coast of a country that could be Tudor England, but it isn't, not quite.

The story plays out in a mysterious, possibly magical alternate world just a few degrees off what you might have learned in history class — but it's packed with intricate, well-researched details. And goats.

In Family Reunion, the new Netflix series, Tia Mowry-Hardrict plays Cocoa McKellan, a free-spirited mother of four and wife of a retired football player, Moz (Anthony Alabi, himself a former NFL player). The McKellans packed their bags in Seattle, Wash., and have moved to Columbus, Ga. to live with Moz's parents — including his old-fashioned mother M'Dear (Loretta Devine).

Mallory: It's Friday! By this point in the con, the crowds are much crowdier, the lines for everything are much longer, the cosplay is starting to come out ... we're in the full swing of things, folks.

Fifty years ago, a bunch of comics fans in San Diego decided they wanted a way to meet other fans. They were mostly teenagers — okay, and two adults — but what they created became the pop culture phenomenon we know as San Diego Comic-Con.

Today, Roger Freedman is a physics professor, but in 1969 he was 17 years old — and he had no idea what he was about to get himself into. "I think it's fair to say that if you had come to us and said how Comic-Con was going to evolve, we would have said A) what are you smoking, and B) where can we buy some?"

In this audio quiz, classical compositions are paired up with contemporary songs they inspired.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

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Pretending they're on a romantic night stroll, contestants must correctly identify facts about the moon that would impress their hypothetical date.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers were not fast friends. Now the co-hosts of the pop culture podcast, Las Culturistas, the two lived on the same floor of their freshman dorm at New York University (NYU) — where they had little to do with each other. Smash cut to 2019 where they are now both emerging voices on the comedy scene.

In this final round, the contestants — plus special guest Bowen Yang — are asked to identify, given a pair of events, which came first?

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

In this game guest-hosted by the host of HQ Words, Anna Roisman, contestants mash-up two initialisms: The first is a government agency, and the second could be anything. For example: if your tax returns are being audited by Kate McKinnon, you've sent them to the I-R-S-N-L.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

In this music game, songs from famous musicals are rewritten to describe the plots of famous non-music dramatic stage plays. It's a crossover the Tony Awards would never themselves allow.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

As a college sophomore, I knew exactly what the Apollo astronauts would find when they arrived on the moon: a desolate rockscape, craters shining white in reflected earthglow — and a big, black monolith.

Stanley Kubrick showed us all of that in the top-grossing movie of 1968 — 2001: A Space Odyssey — a full 15 months before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind. And even Kubrick was late to the party: Moviegoers had been heading moonward from pretty much the moment there were filmmakers to lead the way.

Welcome to the 50th San Diego Comic-Con!

A good convention is almost a ritual space — a time and place away from time and place. Once you step through that glass door and swipe your badge, you could be anywhere, anywhen; the hours pass by outside and you don't notice. It's almost as if the rest of the world doesn't exist — you are at Comic-Con. You have always been at Comic-Con. What I'm trying to say, here, is that I've barely been here 24 hours and I already don't know which way is up or really what day it is. Mallory, I hope you're less disoriented than I am.

Blink and you might miss a priceless bit of fly-by news footage in a new documentary about rocker David Crosby, he of the sixties bands The Byrds and endlessly self-dissolving combinations of Crosby, Still, Nash and Young. Emerging from a spell in prison for gun possession and drug abuse in the mid-'80s, Crosby — shorn of his signature walrus mustache, knitted cap, and cocksure charisma — might easily be mistaken for a low-level clerk in a button-down shirt and nondescript pants belted over an ample paunch.

"You have time, but before the 26th is best."

That's Marianne (Laetitia Casta) going over some awkward practicalities with her live-in boyfriend Abel (Louis Garrel) in the opening scene of A Faithful Man, a French romantic comedy that's as dry as kindling — and nearly as combustible. Moments before, Marianne has informed Abel that she's pregnant. And that his best friend Paul is the father. And that the two have plans to get married later in the month. And that he should probably move his stuff out of the apartment before then.