Arts & Culture

Award-winning author Jason Reynolds returns with a sequel to his young adult novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man. This one is called Miles Morales Suspended, and it continues the adventures of an "unassuming, everyday kid who just so happens to be Spider-Man."

In New York City, the first Monday night in May means the Met Gala — the megawatt party and fashion soiree that raises money for New York's famed Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The new five-part HBO series White House Plumbers, about the men behind the Watergate break-in, begins just like the movie All the President's Men: The time is the early 1970s. The place is the Watergate Hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C., where some mysterious men are trying to gain illegal entry to the Democratic election headquarters there.

At a showcase during the SXSW music festival this past March, Mya Byrne introduced a rollicking country-punk protest song called "Burn This Statehouse Down," with righteous indignation and campy flourish.

Installations by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan are famously provocative, but his signature work — a banana taped to a wall — fell prey to a basic impulse: the hunger it provoked in a South Korean college student.

The art in question, Comedian, is a (frequently replaced) duct-taped banana that is meant to evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy to the fruit's status as an emblem of global trade.

Editor's Note: This interview contains a discussion of self-harm. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

In Limbo is not your typical graphic novel by a first-generation American.

Editor's note: May marks Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which celebrates the histories of Americans hailing from across the Asian continent and from the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. NPR's Picture Show will be bringing stories from these communities to our audience this month.

HBO's new five-part miniseries, White House Plumbers, revisits the infamous Watergate burglary that brought down President Richard Nixon from the perspective of the men who orchestrated it: G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, played by Justin Theroux and Woody Harrelson.

Walking into Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, a new exhibition curated from the late author's archives at Princeton University, is an emotional experience for anyone who loves literature. Dozens of pages are on display, most of them waterlogged and brown from burning.

"These are the fire-singed pieces from the house fire," explains curator Autumn Womack. "I wanted visitors to think about the archive as something that is both fragile but also endures."

On-air challenge: Every answer today is a 7-letter palindrome in two words — reading backward and forward the same. Get the palindromes from their clues.

Ex. #1 position (3,4) --> TOP SPOT

1. Indianapolis 500 vehicle (4,3)

2. Vehicle for taking sailors to Annapolis (4,3)

3. Very, very angry (4,3)

4. Call 911, e.g. (4,3)

More than 40 years after they formed, the music of Metallica is still resonating with new audiences.

Just last year, their 1986 track "Master of Puppets" entered the Billboard charts for the first time in its history after appearing on Stranger Things.

Months later, a string cover of their song "Nothing Else Matters" appeared on The Addams Family spin-off series Wednesday, popular among younger viewers and the TikTok crowd.