A pop-up concert series in Los Angeles is bringing together up-and-coming musicians with an eclectic audience for a pot-luck backyard concert. What more could a West Coast hipster want?

On a cool California night in October 2013, a large harp stands upright on the porch of a house in Los Angeles’s Angeleno Heights neighborhood. Just in front of it, a long table is packed with creative potluck dishes...

Freezing, exhausted and blinded by snow, Yakov Megreli, an Israeli medical student, had a few minutes to make a choice.

He could spend the night shivering in a flimsy wooden tea stall with a few others, as snowdrifts crept up the walls outside and began to fall in through cracks. Or he could press forward into the blizzard with a large group of trekkers headed toward town and led by the tea shop’s owner, who promised to help them to safety if they each paid him 1,000 rupees, about $10...

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”...

Richard Flanagan, who yesterday became the third Australian to win the Booker Prize, for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” was born in Tasmania. More than mere biographical detail, this remote island and its troubled, often violent history is one of his obsessions...

Adolf Hitler is remembered as many things: a genocidal warmonger, a hateful ideologue, a failed art student. But the phrase "drug addict" is usually not high among the list of epithets. A new documentary, to be aired this weekend by Britain's Channel 4, digs into the Führer's "hidden drug habit." Based on details in a 47-page American military dossier compiled during the war, Hitler was taking a cocktail of 74 different drugs...

Joan Didion's trailblazing nonfiction set a forbiddingly high standard, but a slew of idiosyncratic writers are proving that her example may be inimitable but it is also inspiring.

“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman,” writes Lena Dunham in the introduction to her essays-cum-memoir Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.” But does simply announcing one has a story automatically legitimize its telling?...

The most interesting news in former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s memoir, “Worthy Fights,” concerns his disagreements with the Obama White House over Syria, Iraq and the budget crisis — disagreements that have been outlined in recent interviews and in testimony before Congress. Still, Mr. Panetta elaborates on such subjects here, and these passages — in what is otherwise an often opaque and evasive book — shed light on the distressing events now unfolding in the Middle East as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, rolls through large sections of Syria and Iraq...

The  story of America's most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth.

It has been nearly half a century since a young antiwar protester named Tom Hayden traveled to Hanoi to investigate President Lyndon B. Johnson’s claims that the United States was not bombing civilians in Vietnam. Mr. Hayden saw destroyed villages and came away, he says, “pretty wounded by the pattern of deception.”Now the Pentagon — run by a Vietnam veteran, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — is planning a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam War...

In the winter of 1844, Major Robert Gill, a young British military draftsman, set off from Madras into the independent princely state of Hyderabad to record a major new archaeological discovery. Some years earlier, in 1819, a British hunting party in the jungles of the Western Ghats had followed a tiger into a remote river valley and stumbled onto what was soon recognized as one of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta...