Apparently, a church dance in Greeley, Colo., led to 9/11.

In 1948 Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who became the father of the radical Islamist movement, was sent to the United States to temper his contempt for the West. What he saw over two years — postwar consumerism, suburban lawns, men and women dancing “breast to breast” — only further inflamed his conviction that the West was the enemy of Islam and doomed.

Mr. Qutb went on to work up a pseudospiritual justification of Islamic terrorism that inspired and emboldened many, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. And that modest Colorado mixer — back then, Greeley was a dry town — was Mr. Qutb’s “epiphanic moment,” as Malise Ruthven, a Middle East expert, puts it in “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda,” the first documentary in the weeklong, 11-part PBS series “America at a Crossroads.”

The title alone suggests the series’s ambition: “Crossroads” is an attempt to look at...

The handsome wooden courtroom that has been erected on the stage of the Lyceum Theater is Christopher Plummer’s personal playground. This may sound like a frivolous description of a forum for the lofty and abidingly important debate that occupies “Inherit the Wind,” the 1955 drama that opened last night, also starring Brian Dennehy, in a revival that is just about as wooden as its set.

But while the subject of teaching evolution and religion in public schools is even more topical than it was when Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s worthy war horse first galloped onto Broadway more than half a century ago, Mr. Plummer at play is something sacred. If the Bible-quoting fundamentalists in “Inherit the Wind” want to make a case for the spark of divinity that separates man from beast, they need only point to the show’s august star, having the time of his life, as Exhibit A.

Approaching the end of his eighth decade, Mr. Plummer knows that if all the world’s a stage,...

They are three of Russia's most towering cultural figures: the national poet Alexander Pushkin, the composer Sergei Prokofiev, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary theatrical director who was imprisoned and executed during Stalin's purges.

Now after a delay of 70 years, the fruit of their collective genius will be unveiled in a world premiere of a new version of Pushkin's verse masterpiece, Boris Godunov. But the performance will not take place on a Moscow or St Petersburg stage, but more than 4,000 miles away at Princeton University, in New Jersey.

The story of the lost Boris Godunov and how the work made its way from a long-closed Russian state archive to an Ivy League campus in America, begins in the mid-1930s, when Prokofiev and Meyerhold joined forces to produce their own version of the Pushkin classic - a bleak tale of tyranny, war, betrayal and murder based on the life of the 16th century regent and tsar.

The story of Godunov, and the "...

Kurt Vonnegut , whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
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The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity...

The river is brown and pungent, the houses are haunted and the streets teem with thieves.

Charles Dickens's England, however, never had construction workers in hard hats and high visibility vests.

News that the finishing touches are being applied to the £62 million theme park may be unwelcome among literary purists, but Dickens World in Chatham, Kent, is expected to attract more than 300,000 visitors a year.

The complex offers a boat ride in a London sewer, a haunted house and a reconstruction of Newgate Prison. Children can get a dose of Victorian discipline in an 1832-style school, or enjoy a play area called Fagin's Den.

Built on the former site of the Royal Naval Dockyard, where Dickens's father worked, the centre opens on April 20.

AARSCHOT, Belgium — During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights.

Her husband, Daniel Grandjean, a 50-year-old furniture maker with a pot belly and bushy beard, becomes an ax-wielding soldier-for-hire. It was he who persuaded the council in this sleepy Flemish town to let the couple live part time in the 700-year-old Sint-Rochus tower, where guards once stood watch to prevent Aarschot, then built of wood and straw, from catching fire.

When not inhabiting the tower, the couple sleep in a replica of a medieval bed at home. They avoid eating tomatoes or drinking coffee because Columbus had yet to discover America in the Middle Ages, and such foods were not available in what was...

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.]

I always take in the Hollywood period dramas set in ancient Greece or Rome. My film-buff son is into this too, so we went last week to see 300, the Warner Brothers' blockbuster produced by Zack Snyder and based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller about the epic battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks and Persians. It had by that time grossed over 100 million...

In this issue, Rebecca Mead reports on the reopening of the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The renovation took thirty years, cost more than two hundred million dollars, and has been completed at a controversial time in the world of antiquities. In the past decade, a number of high-profile court cases have centered on the illegal excavation and exportation of ancient archeological finds. Here is a portfolio of images of the galleries and of some of the treasures featured in the piece.

An eight-year-old boy, dressed as Hitler and warped by repeated viewings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, leads a marching parade past the town synagogue. “Es is Zeit fur Rache!” Eric Cartman chants (“It is time for revenge!”). “Wir mussen die Juden ausrotten!” the crowd replies (“We must exterminate the Jews!”). This is the world of South Park, the animated satire that last week depicted the bloody suicide of the Queen, bringing predictable calls for censorship when the series is broadcast in Britain later this year. Her Majesty got off lightly. In the same episode, Hillary Clinton had a terrorist nuclear device cunningly planted within. The adverb is the clue.

The phrase most commonly used to describe South Park’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, is that they are equal-opportunity offenders. So, while Jesus hosts a lame Jerry Springer-style daytime television show, Satan is a wimp, bossed about by Saddam Hussein, his boyfriend. The South Park staple is to...