As an activist I have pretty much been doing what Nelson Mandela tells me since I was a teenager. He has been a forceful presence in my life going back to 1979, when U2 made its first anti-apartheid effort. And he’s been a big part of the Irish consciousness even longer than that. Irish people related all too easily to the subjugation of ethnic majorities. From our point of view, the question as to how bloody South Africa would have to get on its long road to freedom was not abstract...

I had many conversations with Nelson Mandela, although I had not met him.

In my family's tiny shack in Nairobi's Kibera slum, my one-way exchanges with the great man kept me going. Mandela survived 27 years of prison; maybe I would make it out, too.

Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994, when I was 10 years old. In Kibera, people celebrated and talk circulated the streets about this man, but I didn't see how his story connected to mine until much later. I was struggling too hard simply to survive...

I was a child. He was an old man. But he held the promise of an unborn nation...

So what happened to turn marijuana legalization from stoner fantasy to political reality?...Meet the man who's making marijuana mainstream...

André Schiffrin, a publishing force for 50 years, whose passion for editorial independence produced shelves of serious books, a titanic collision with a conglomerate that forced him out to stem losses, and a late-in-life comeback as a nonprofit publisher, died in Paris on Sunday. He was 78...

"Uncle Walt, as I called him, was determined that although I was an eight-year-old working on a film, I should still have a magical time. He flew my mother and two sisters to the US to be with me during the nine months of filming. Whenever we had a free weekend, he'd lend us his plane – called Mickey Mouse – and we would go down to his ranch in Santa Barbara. I was a nervous flyer so he had the plane done out like a sweetshop. When the seatbelt sign went off, we could sell candy to our mum..."

In a string of landmark cases to be filed this week, four chimpanzees will fight for the right to retire to sanctuaries. Could dolphins be next on the docket?...

The first thing I learned about shooting a TV series on location in Washington is that you can’t. While news crews freely roam Senate hallways and committee rooms, films and TV shows are barred from working anywhere on the Capitol grounds. That meant that Alpha House, the new Amazon series centering on four senators that I’m helping to produce, was going to have to create its own Senate.

But where? Strict congressional rules and a shortage of soundstages and tax breaks in Washington mean that political shows are generally filmed in Los Angeles (Scandal, The West Wing), Baltimore (Veep, House of Cards) or New York. We chose New York for no other reason than that the show’s creator, Garry Trudeau of “Doonesbury” fame, and I live there, and our other executive producer, Elliot Webb, likes to visit...

The first thing I learned about shooting a TV series on location in Washington is that you can’t. While news crews freely roam Senate hallways and committee rooms, films and TV shows are barred from working anywhere on the Capitol grounds. That meant that Alpha House, the new Amazon series centering on four senators that I’m helping to produce, was going to have to create its own Senate.

But where? Strict congressional rules and a shortage of soundstages and tax breaks in Washington mean that political shows are generally filmed in Los Angeles (Scandal, The West Wing), Baltimore (Veep, House of Cards) or New York. We chose New York for no other reason than that the show’s creator, Garry Trudeau of “Doonesbury” fame, and I live there, and our other executive producer, Elliot Webb, likes to visit...

David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle...