Joe Mathieu has illustrated more than 100 children’s books and has created thousands of illustrations for Sesame Street books and other products.

Nothing kills the mood before a show like a clunky cell phone announcement or fundraising pitch from the stage.

Five questions with Femke Hiemstra about "Rock Candy," her lovely and surreal book of collected art.

Leon Chiappini hooks a tire-sized cymbal around his finger and spins it like a basketball. He hits it and listens for the ding, the gravel and the growl: elements of crash that the average ear can’t hear. If it’s not perfect, Chiappini tosses it in the reject pile. “After 49 years, I’d better know if it’s good,” he said with a laugh.

I like to think of film critic Roger Ebert as a sieve. When Hollywood releases a film, it's probably going to go through him. And after taking in a flick and sharing his thoughts, his readers are left with just the stuff that they can use - a solid opinion, a little humor, an idea of whether or not they'll be wanting to shell out their money to take a look themselves.

Checklists, writes Boston surgeon and author Atul Gawande in his book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” are considered by many to be beneath us. Yet Gawande proves, without a doubt, that checklists — cognitive safety nets — save lives, millions of dollars and untold heartache, whether the task is flying an airplane, building a skyscraper or operating on an adrenal gland.

Bruce Brown of Springfield first discovered comic books as a child. A specialist recommended them to Brown’s parents to help their son overcome some reading difficulties. Now he not only enjoys reading comic books, he writes them, too. Brown’s latest graphic novel, released earlier this year, is “Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom.”

Jonathan Dee’s new critically acclaimed novel “The Privileges” starts with a wedding, impressive for the deft writing that conveys the controlled chaos, the edgy anxieties, the many tensions springing from family members’ vying needs.

In bestselling author Chris Bohjalian’s “Secrets of Eden,” some mysteries untangle themselves as we approach the last pages of his cleverly told novel.

In 2007, Dr. David Dosa wrote an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine about a cat at the Steere House nursing home in Providence, R.I., who apparently had the ability to sense when a patient was going to die. The media picked up the story and almost overnight, Oscar the cat became an international phenomenon.

Daniel Menaker, author and editor, has been thinking a lot about the qualities of good conversation. His new book, “A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation,” is an entertaining, thought-provoking, at times irritating compendium that considers the history, the structure, the process, the value of conversation.

An exhibit of his paintings is on view in “John William Waterhouse, Garden of Enchantment,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in the only scheduled North American stop of a tour of the paintings.

Erin Hammill selects a pen and leans over a drafting table. On the piece of art paper placed on the table, a picture of a pair of elephants is taking shape. She uses the pen — a 005, with the finest of points — to create a series of dots within the penciled-out sketch of the two animals. And slowly, the baby elephant’s ear begins to fill in, with the dots creating the most subtle of shadings of light and dark. The technique, called stippling, uses dots to create the desired effects within the design.

In Stephen King's "Under the Dome," Chester's Mill, Maine, is suddenly transformed into a cruel version of an ant farm - or maybe, more accurately, a miniature "Lord of the Flies" - when an invisible, impenetrable dome slaps down over the whole town.

Phillip Prodger, photography curator at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, has published a book exploring Charles Darwin’s use of photography in his research on the origins and commonality of life.

The spirit of the season and love for the history of passenger trains is brought forth in a book by James E. Kaserman and Sarah Jane Kaserman.

We’re basically living in Ray Bradbury’s imagined world now. Even those particularly familiar with this author are acting out all the permutations of his visions.

Stone-age homo sapiens wore them as protection. Romans traded them across their empire. Zulus used them to distinguish social class. Considered so valuable by Native Americans they sold the island of Manhattan for a few of them. What are they? Beads.

Talk to Mark O’Connor, fiddler extraordinaire and sometime collaborator with Yo Yo Ma, and you glimpse not only where music has been but where it’s going. And where it’s going seems to be a much more flexible, improvisatory, creative place thanks to exploding technology and the mingling of world cultures. O’Connor, his music and his philosophy will return to Peoria at 8 p.m. on Saturday.

It all began with a toy. It was a rare cast-iron cannon, shaped identically to those that helped the North topple the South during the Civil War, and it was buried deep inside a trash heap. It was 1942, the world was at war, and toys were hard to come by for Carthage resident George Terry, at the time just 7 and desperately in search of something that would serve as an outlet for his imagination.