Places & Travel

Rita Morena was the first Latina actor to receive the Oscar, for her performance in West Side Story, but she almost didn't take role. She went on to other memorable roles, but had to fight typecasting, and sexism in the industry. Now at the age of 89, she's the subject of an upcoming documentary.

Time correspondent Simon Shuster says that Andriy Derkach, a seven-term member of the Ukrainian parliament, gave misleading information to Rudy Giuliani to discredit Biden during the 2020 campaign.

Bandleader and reed player Hutchings was born in London, but partly raised in Barbados. His new album with Sons of Kemet highlights the criss-crossing trajectories of African musical diasporas.

Jeffrey Gettleman of the N.Y. Times says the air has been filled with smoke from crematories. Meanwhile, the health care system is collapsing and the black market for oxygen and medicine is thriving.

For her second solo album, Kennedy's array of diverse songs — from thumping electronica to full-throated crooning — shows us she won't be pinned down

Justin Chang says the captivating new drama, "The Disciple," is one of the best movies he's seen this year. The film won the best screenplay prize at last year's Venice International Film Festival. It tells the story of a young man from Mumbai who aspires to be a great classical Indian singer.

Maureen Corrigan reviews an offbeat little novel called Nives by Italian writer Sacha Naspini.

Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s "Resistance" podcast explores different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. The podcast has been mostly devoted to the protests that started last summer after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it also chronicles Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s personal history.

Reem assis says that many foods that are considered Middle Eastern or Israeli actually originated as Palestinian dishes. Her first cookbook, The Palestinian Table, chronicled the history of Palestinian food — along with some of her personal history. In her new book, The Arabesque Table, Kassis expands the focus to the cross-cultural culinary history of the Arab world.

John Powers reviews 'The Man Who Sold His Skin,' a funny, touching and pointed film that's been nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature.

For Helfer, vintage piano dialects are living traditions, not museum exhibits. The 85-year-old Chicago musician helps keep those traditions alive — and passes that knowledge on — with a new album.

What sets Ellen McGarrahan's just-published true crime book, Two Truths and a Lie, above so many others I've read is the moral gravity of her presence on the page and the hollow-voiced lyricism of her writing style.

New York Times cyber security reporter Nicole Perlroth calls the SolarWinds hack "one of the biggest intelligence failures of our time."

My Year Abroad is Chang-rae Lee's new exuberant novel that takes readers on an excursion out of the New Jersey suburbs and across the Pacific into some of the more luxurious reaches of Asian megacities.

The Lady and the Dale is a new HBO documentary miniseries co-directed by Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker. It's about a female automobile executive who took on the Detroit automakers and tried to market a gas-efficient car in the 1970s, at the height of the oil crisis.

The documentarian, who died Jan. 7, spent decades following the lives of a group of British citizens, updating their stories with a new episode every seven years. Originally broadcast in 2013.

Iconoclastic humorist Fran Lebowitz used to be known as a writer. Back in the late 1970s and '80s, she released two popular collections of essays featuring her cutting observations and opinions about life. But that part of her career was cut short by a decades-long case of writer's block — now she's known for talking. The Netflix series Pretend It's a City features Lebowitz in conversation with Martin Scorsese — who directed both the new series and the 2010 HBO documentary about Lebowitz, Public Speaking.

Maria Ressa has faced criminal charges, death threats and internet trolls because of her coverage of the Philippine president. She's the subject of a new PBS FRONTLINE documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

Kai Strittmatter's new book, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State, examines the role of surveillance in China's authoritarian state. He warns that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, has embraced an ideological rigidity unknown since the days of Mao Zedong.

Bassett plays world-renowned jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams in Disney/Pixar's latest animated film. She talks about that role, as well as the challenges she's faced as a Black woman in Hollywood.