In a forum at Kresge Auditorium last night, scholars discussed a side of Iraq rarely covered in the nightly news: the rich artistic history of the country.

“While we all hear about Iraq in the news, we don’t hear that Iraq had a thriving culture,” said Nada Shabout, a professor of Arab visual and Islamic art at the University of North Texas.

As the third out of five conversations in the “Iraq: Reframe: Iraq’s Lost National Treasures” series, last night’s event aimed to reframe popular conceptions of Iraq with a focus on the arts.

McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist from the University of Chicago, spoke alongside Shabout at the event, while Stanford’s Iranian Studies Program Director Abbas Milani served as moderator.

Iraq was once the center of Mesopotamia, one of the world’s earliest civilizations, and the allure of its ancient art exists through the present. However, Shabout fears that the violence in the Middle Eastern state today will...

“Secrets of the Parthenon,” Tuesday night on PBS, is no mere how-did-they-lift-those-heavy-rocks rumination. It’s a condensed mathematics course, challenging you to keep up as it examines the principles and proportions the ancient Greeks used to erect that majestic building. You may fall by the wayside in the home stretch, which features a detailed analysis of the slight curve in the Parthenon’s columns, but you’ll still feel smarter by the program’s end.

“The Parthenon, like a statue, exemplifies a certain symmetry, a certain harmony of part to part, and of part to the whole,” explains Jeffrey M. Hurwit, an art historian at the University of Oregon. “There’s no question that the harmony of the building, which is clearly one of its most visible characteristics, is dependent upon a certain mathematical system of proportions.”

On March 30, 1908, Chester Gillette, 25, was executed at Auburn State Prison in New York for the murder of his pregnant lover, Grace Brown, on an Adirondack lake in 1906. His sensational trial inspired the Theodore Dreiser novel “An American Tragedy,” the 1951 film “A Place in the Sun” and an opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera. Now, as the 100th anniversary of Gillette’s electrocution approaches, Hamilton College has published “The Prison Diary and Letters of Chester Gillette,” taken from papers donated to the college last year by Gillette’s grandniece, Marlynn McWade-Murray, The Associated Press reported....

Imagining that late December night of long darkness, you can almost hear these youths of Vermont tramping up to the isolated farmhouse to intrude upon the sanctuary stillness. The break of snow beneath their feet would be the least of it.

They had driven or walked a half-mile up a snow-covered lane called Frost Road, then trudged past a large blue sign that explained the historic significance of the farmhouse and the cabin beyond. And now they were entering the coldness of an uninhabited place, carrying with them cases of beer, bottles of rum and a store of ignorance about things that matter here.

Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.

The damage left in their wake reflected some alcohol-induced mischief tinged with certain...

Heath Ledger passed away only Tuesday, but his transformation is already under way, from acclaimed actor to most-searched Internet term, from film star to cultural touchstone.

The blogosphere went into overdrive. In two days his memorial page on Facebook had over 30,000 members. The entertainment Web site TMZ generated over 74 pages of user comments. Hundreds of eulogies for the 28-year-old Australian appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald’s site.

What accounts for this need to pay public tribute? Successive generations have felt that impulse — the need to make sense of untimely death, and even justify it, by celebrating the dead young person in an outsize way, or, every so often, to attend the funeral of someone they don’t know.

When the actor Rudolph Valentino lay in state in 1926 at the age of 31, more than 50,000 fans showed up. In 1955, Baby Boomers grieved the passing of the 24-year-old James Dean, who received two posthumous Academy Award...

George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled “A Charge to Keep.” Bush was so taken by it, that he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography....

"I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."

So in Bush’s view (or perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century....

... Jacob Weisberg has solved the mystery. He invested the time to...

The Jewish Americans is the title of a new six-hour documentary about Jews in the United States, made with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, that will begin airing January 9 on PBS stations around the country. Note the title, The Jewish Americans, if you please, not “The American Jews.” “Jewish Americans” puts the emphasis where it belongs: on America. “American Jews” would put it on Jews. The vast majority of Jews who live in the United States think themselves Americans who are also Jewish, some intensely so, some only peripherally.

David Grubin, who wrote and directed this interesting documentary, got his title, and much else, dead-on right. His informative and entertaining film does not, in any serious sense, depart from the standard form of the modern television documentary. But he brings this form to a high sheen, with a solid narration spoken at a perfect pitch of serious non-pretentiousness by the actor Liev Schreiber and haunting music by...

An important part of the Auschwitz Museum collection are paintings, drawings and sculptures made during the camp’s existence and after the war. It has just been enriched by over one hundred works by Jan Komski, an Auschwitz prisoner.

Director Oliver Stone, who has made movies about Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, is developing a project about the current occupant of the White House, but promises it will not be a hatchet job, Daily Variety reported on Sunday.

Stone is in talks with Josh Brolin, who is starring in "No Country For Old Men," to play the title role in "Bush," the trade paper said.

He is shopping the script to financiers and hopes to start production by April, with a release date in time for the election in November, or the inauguration of Bush's successor in January.

Stone told Daily Variety that he planned to make "a fair, true portrait" of Bush, focusing on such areas as his relationship with his father, President George H.W. Bush, his wild youth, and his conversion to Christianity.

"It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors," said Stone.