[Former Congressman Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.) serves as host of "Scarborough Country," weeknights 10-11 p.m. ET on MSNBC.]

It's hard to believe it's almost been 30 years since I heard Howard Cosell deliver the news on Monday Night Football that John Lennon had been killed.

I was still in high school when John Lennon died so I was too young to remember the Beatles as anything more than a former band.

When the Beatles invaded America, I was less than a year old.

Three summers later, when Sgt. Peppers transformed popular music and America's culture, I was still a toddler.

But regardless of my late start, John Lennon and the Beatles still changed my life in a way that few others have. I didn't see the Fab Four introduced to America by Ed Sullivan, or endure the pain of a breakup to the strains of "Yesterday," or drop acid with my friends while listening to Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. But I did have...

Scholarly and artistic focus: An art historian and practicing artist from Nigeria who has had more than 35 one-person and group exhibitions around the world, Okeke-Agulu's research focuses on classical, modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art history. He is the co-curator of the exhibition"Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art," currently at the Princeton University Art Museum. His most recent book,"Contemporary African Art Since 1980," co-written with art curator and historian Okwui Enwezor, was published this fall.

How did the exhibition"Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art" (open until Jan. 24) come about?

After I designed the syllabus for"Art and Lifecycle in Africa," a freshman seminar I am teaching this fall, I approached the museum with a request for a precept show. Normally, this is a modest exhibit designed to allow students to engage more directly and intimately with art objects relevant to the course. As it...

FREDERICKSBURG — When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Bob Jensen was 17 and assigned to the USS Maryland. The battleship, one of eight in the harbor that day, was struck by two bombs; four men lost their lives.

Jensen doesn't like to talk about that day or his experiences fighting in World War II. He doesn't watch war movies anymore. And during a visit Monday to the George H.W. Bush Gallery of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, he passed through quickly, not lingering on the images within.

But Jensen, who lives in Sun City, Ariz., said he feels deeply that the museum's lessons are important for future generations: "I think that every kid in the United States should go through that museum."

The museum's expanded gallery reopened Monday after a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by former President Bush and his wife, Gov. Rick Perry and more than 5,000 people, including survivors of Pearl Harbor....

More than 500 people have approached The Second City's co-founder Bernard Sahlins over the years to assure him that they were among the 120 present at the improvisational comedy troupe's opening night in two former storefronts on Chicago's Near North Side. They even remember the date: Dec. 16, 1959.

And who's to say? Perhaps half a century from now thousands will be moseying over to Andrew Alexander, The Second City's co-owner since 1985, swearing that they were among the 350 in the audience for the company's 50th reunion in expanded quarters a few blocks south of the original location.

The celebration, which begins Friday and runs until Sunday evening, includes panel discussions on such topics as "Voices of Diversity at The Second City," "Second City in the Sixties," "SCTV"—a nod to the TV series conjured by members of the company's sister site in Toronto—and of course live performances by some whose careers were launched in those...

The first thing that comes to mind when holding graphic novelist and journalist Joe Sacco’s new book, “Footnotes in Gaza,” is the colossal amount of work that went into it. Not only is this pen-and-ink graphic novel almost 400 pages long, the subject too is heavy: The Israeli military’s massacre of Palestinian civilians in Khan Younis and Rafah (Gaza), during the 1956 Suez Crisis. The Malta-born American researched and reported on the subject for seven years, making two extended trips to Gaza – where he was often under fire from weapons paid for with his tax dollars.

Sacco, who has written and illustrated six graphic novels, is best known for his “Palestine,” penned after spending two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991 and 1992. It was not an immediate success, selling poorly when it first appeared as a comic series. After the publica­tion of Sacco’s subsequent gra­phic novel – “Safe Area Goraz­de,” which follows the war in Eastern Bosnia from 1992-95 – the “...

This weekend, a surprise list of star performers celebrated Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, director Mel Brooks, jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, and opera singer Grace Bumbry at the Kennedy Center Honors. Three hundred guests, including Jack Black, Edward Norton, Sting, and Martin Scorsese, attended a reception in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the occasion. "I think when all my awards go to eBay, it will be the last," Brooks said of his Kennedy Center medal. President Obama quipped that "I think I had a fake ID" when he went to see Blazing Saddles at age 10, but luckily, "the statute of limitations has passed." Former president and saxophone player Bill Clinton offered a heartfelt toast to Brubeck, whose music "utterly captivated" him from the first time he heard it in concert at age 15.

The Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor takes you back to Dec. 7, 1941.

It's early Sunday morning. The red-and-white control tower stands over the Ford Island Airfield in the middle of Pearl Harbor. You feel the percussion of Japanese attackers' bombs as they fall on Ford Island and the ships anchored nearby.

Sailors, soldiers and airmen dodge the bullets as they rip through the glass windows of burning aircraft hangars.

You are there where bravery overcame fear and boys became men. World War II had begun for the United States.

"This new museum opened in December 2006 and is the perfect complement to the other Pearl Harbor historic sites," says Kenneth DeHoff, museum executive director.

Indeed, it is adjacent to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial; the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, on which the Japanese surrender was signed; and the U.S.S. Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park, honoring WWII submariners.

As we...

MORGAN FREEMAN has been cast as God — twice — so he evidently has no trouble projecting moral authority. The challenge of portraying Nelson Mandela, then, was not the size of the halo, but knowing the performance would be measured against the real, familiar Mandela, and his myth. “If we can say any part of acting is hard, then playing someone who is living and everybody knows would be the hardest,” Mr. Freeman said in a phone interview.

The role has defeated actors as varied as Danny Glover (the 1987 TV film “Mandela”), Sidney Poitier (“Mandela and de Klerk,” 1997, also for TV) and Dennis Haysbert (“Goodbye Bafana,” 2007), in vehicles that were reverential and mostly forgettable.

But as someone who studied Mr. Mandela over the course of three years while he replaced an apartheid regime with a genuine democracy, I found Mr. Freeman’s performance in the film “Invictus,” directed by Clint Eastwood, uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.

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ROME – It is the sort of intriguing, self-referential clue that author Dan Brown would have his hero, the cerebral “symbologist” Robert Langdon, chasing after in one of his bestselling books.

But the tiny self-portrait that Italian art historians believe they have found in an oil painting by Caravaggio is real.

The painting, “Bacchus,” was completed by the Renaissance master in 1597 and depicts the mythical god of wine. On a table in front of him is a carafe of dark red wine. So far, so ordinary – at least by the standards of 16th-century art.

But researchers have used an infrared technique called multispectral reflectography to “peer” through centuries of grime and added layers of paint and claim to have detected a miniature self-portrait. It shows a man, thought to be Caravaggio at the age of about 25, with dark curly hair, peeking out from inside the carafe.