Arts & Life

Scholastic began as a four-page magazine for high schoolers in 1920. Today, the publisher of Clifford the Big Red Dog, The Magic School Bus, Harry Potter and The Hunger Game, has grown into a $2 billion business, and one of the biggest children's book publishers in the world.

After the Civil War, pursuing butterflies was more than a pastime for many Americans — it was a passion. In his book, Butterfly People, William Leach chronicles the infatuation, from its European roots and natural-history tradition to its eventual fall.

The cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid, has skyrocketed ever since Dominique Ansel started selling it at his New York City bakery this spring. Patrons line up for hours, and scalpers have jacked up the price exponentially.

Mads Mikkelsen (TV's Hannibal) anchors The Hunt, a powerful Danish social drama about a teacher whose life is derailed when a 5-year-old's emotional upset sets a citywide witch hunt in motion. (Recommended)

A dead body and a hotel bombing trigger the plot of Black Star Nairobi, the latest crime novel from Kenyan-American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Detectives Ishmael Fofona and David Odhiambo search for the perps during the upheaval around the Kenyan elections in December 2007.

Waters created Drunk History after hearing a friend sloshily recount the story of Otis Redding's death. Now, the popular series has been picked up by Comedy Central, where viewers can see famous actors lip-sync drunken narrators' laughably wrong versions of historical events.

The new film from the director of Man on Wire and Project Nim, James Marsh, is a fiction film about the period toward the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It stars Clive Owen and up-and-comer Andrea Riseborough.

The director talks to NPR's Audie Cornish about Japanese cinema, growing up watching kaiju films like Godzilla in Mexico, and his new action epic, Pacific Rim.

Aaron Sorkin's HBO series The Newsroom, starring Jeff Daniels as cable news anchorman Will McAvoy, returns July 14 for its second season. TV critic David Bianculli says some critics find the show preachy, but he likes that it tackles serious and complicated subjects.

David Edelstein reviews Fruitvale Station, a dramatization of the last day of a man shot by San Francisco transit police in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009.