Before last Dec. 14, Jimmy Greene had been a jazzman for most of his 38 years, well known among serious jazz fans. He had dozens of albums to his name. He played with such luminaries as Freddie Hubbard. He was a scholar, too, teaching jazz at a public university.

On Dec. 14, Mr. Greene’s 6-year-old daughter, Ana Márquez-Greene, who shared his passion for music and loved to listen to her father play, was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That was the day a gunman killed Ana along with 19 other children and 6 educators.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever feel whole again,” Mr. Greene said of his family...

After a year of traveling, I had planned a last, short trip. I was going to take the train from Montreal to New Orleans. The travels I had been undertaking earlier this year had brought me to places that were meant to form the background of my second novel.

This trip, however, was for my dad. He, a trumpet player, loved New Orleans and had died a year ago. It felt like the first sensible trip I undertook this year. I had been searching for ways to forget about the last hours at his deathbed. He had been ill for 15 years and his body just would not give up. It was a violent sight. I had decided the trip to New Orleans would put an end to those memories...

For years, the tech billionaire Pierre M. Omidyar has been experimenting with ways to promote serious journalism, searching for the proper media platform to support with the fortune he earned as the founder of eBay. He has made grants to independent media outlets in Africa and government watchdog groups in the United States. In a more direct effort, he created a news Web site in Hawaii, his home state...

Norman Mailer was one of the most original and powerful writers of the twentieth century, but he never wrote a truly great novel. Despite the great success of his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” which he wrote at twenty-three, and despite the merits of his second and third novels, “Barbary Shore” and “The Deer Park,” Mailer missed the boat early on, because he never wrote (and seems never even to have considered writing) the book that he was born to write—the bildungsroman of a Maileresque boy in Brooklyn in the nineteen-thirties. Had he written a novel based on his early experiences, it might have done more than launch his career (which “The Naked and the Dead” did quite well); it might have launched his imagination. The power of deep-rooted experience, I suspect, would have given rise to a self-sustaining run of novels. Instead, he sacrificed his literary birthright for the pursuit of experiences that he considered literature-worthy, and he paid a high price to replace it...

Give the Republicans on Capitol Hill one thing: they don’t leave a job half done. Evidently disturbed by polls showing Congress with a single-digit approval rating, they appear intent on driving it to zero.

What other explanation can there be for Tuesday’s farcical maneuvers, which saw the House Republican leadership try and fail to seize the initiative in the debt-ceiling standoff from the Senate, in the process humiliating Speaker Boehner yet again...

When you’re young, and you’re obsessed with rock music, and you have friends (particularly male friends) who are equally obsessed with rock music, and none of you have anything better to do, which is usually the case with teenage boys, you tend to ask each other questions like “What’s the best live album of all time?” And because you yourself are a teenage boy, you know your answer is the right answer, the one true answer, and you proceed to argue on its behalf for the next two hours, repeating again and again, as others advocate for Neil Young’s Live Rust or The Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, that actually the best live album of all time is Live at Leeds by The Who. Or at least you did if you were me...

Today is Columbus Day in the United States of America. When asked to describe Christopher Columbus most people generally say two things...

On Tuesday, The International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times, becomes The International New York Times.

If you aren't in the ag world, you most likely haven't heard about the devastating loss that ranchers in western South Dakota are struggling with after being hit by winter storm Atlas. For some reason the news stations aren't covering this story. I don't understand why they wouldn't. This story has heartbreak, tragedy and even a convenient tie into the current government shutdown. Isn't that what the news is all about these days?But the news isn't covering this story. Instead, it is spreading around on social media, and bloggers are writing from their ranches in South Dakota...

The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint...