Laughter plays a crucial role in every culture across the world. But it’s not clear why laughter exists. While it is evidently an inherently social phenomenon – people are up to 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than when alone – laughter’s function as a form of communication remains mysterious.

In 2013, 27 percent of adults aged 65 and older belonged to a social network, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Now, the number is 35 percent and is continuing to show an upward trend.

With digital content, it's a self-perpetuating cycle, where the stronger content provider becomes even stronger over time

The death of Harper Lee is big news. Bigger than the deaths of most major writers. Why? It isn’t because she made worldwide headlines last summer due to the controversy over the recent publication of Go Set A Watchman.

It was with some trepidation that I went to watch The Danish Girl. Prior to its release the film had already attracted accusations of transphobia for director Tom Hooper’s decision to cast the cisgender actor Eddie Redmayne in the title role of Lili Elbe, a trans woman.

Auld Lang Syne was famously written by the Scottish national bard, Robert Burns. What is less well known is that the melody was not the one he intended. The one that became famous was first attached to the song in the late 1790s and Burns, who died in 1796, knew nothing about it.

A man winds his way through the muck and mire of a 19th-century American port – Nantucket, centre of the world’s whaling industry. He knocks on a door, enters, and begs an exhausted looking man to tell him his story in exchange for his life savings.

Christmas has become a cultural event, associated with the giving of gifts and lavish meals with friends and family. But the traditional understanding of Christmas is that it’s a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus.

Indeed, the past year saw audiences becoming more and more amenable to adopting new ways to watch TV shows, with live audiences for broadcast and cable programs declining sharply.

Intellectuals, academics and artists play a unique role in society: they preserve and defend both freedom of expression and the morality of choices. Artists can use their work as a means to communicate messages of dissent and hope in the face of injustice, repression and despair.

In certain corners of the internet a modern myth celebrates the idea that Ben Rich, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin “Skunk Works” – the legendary and highly secretive wing of Lockheed Martin concerned with aircraft development – concluded a 1993 presentation at UCLA with the blockbuster line: “We now have the technology to take E.T. home.”

Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on December 12 is being celebrated with all the requisite fanfare: Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, CBS' Sinatra 100 All-Star Grammy Concert, exhibits at the Lincoln Center and Grammy Museum, a London Palladium show and a number of book publications.

Bad sex. Isn’t it enough to have had it without having to read it as well? A poorly written sex scene can be viscerally dreadful. While porn is fundamentally unrealistic, bad sex in prose that’s not explicit can be excruciating.

A film adaptation of the celebrated Scottish novel Sunset Song is arriving at a time of recurrent European financial crises and a war in the Middle East that is sucking in many of the world’s major powers for the second time in a generation.

Most people think of rest as the times when we stop work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength. But historians and anthropologists have discovered that what counts as rest has varied a lot over time and across cultures.

An insistent clamour of bells and horns recurs throughout Carol, evoking the stifling, heavy atmosphere of conformity that overlay early 1950s America. An older woman, the wealthy, strikingly beautiful Carol (Cate Blanchett), starts an affair with young salesgirl and aspiring photographer, Therese (Rooney Mara).

In the past 150 years Lewis Carroll’s Alice has undergone innumerable transformations. Instantly popular, she quickly escaped her original novelistic environment, appearing in Victorian Punch caricatures, on magic lantern slides and on stage.

We’re exposed to music for nearly 20% of our waking lives. But much of our musical experience seems to be a mystery. Why does some music bring us to tears while other pieces make us dance? Why is it that the music that we like can make others agitated?

My mission in this article is to share with you what I’ve learned and observed as a longtime coach of graduate students and writer of creative projects. Here are some techniques, tools, and tough questions to ease the trek for yourself and everyone around you...

At first, deciding about television was a simple matter of thoughtful grading. A slow matter, too, as I had been watching television for all these days and never thought of grading it. How I grade: Every news event in a half-hour newscast, would earn a grade from me, its viewer.

Are we not more important than our cell phones? Our “batteries” run low as well. Few people are as urgent to charge their own batteries as they are to charge up their cell phone. We push and push ourselves to keep going and we don’t pay attention to our own battery or need to be recharged.