Seamus Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died at a hospital in Dublin on Friday after a short illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74...

"The main thing is to write for the joy of it."...

Doug Aitkien's 'Station to Station' throws artists, musicians, and everything in between on a cross-country train to see what sticks.

Four years ago multimedia artist Doug Aitken began thinking about the experience of viewing art, and watching movies, and listening to music, and how it all seemed the same: confined within the walls of a museum, gallery, concert venue, or movie theater. “Things created within art or music or film or architecture, they’re often restrained by the system that surrounds them,” Aitken says.

So he came up with Station to Station: A Nomadic Happening. It's what he calls a "liquid art platform," a constantly moving and evolving venue with no set parameters for experience the art...

We flew to Washington the day before the march and, early the next morning, walked from Pennsylvania Avenue past the side entrance of the White House and toward the lawn of the Washington Monument, where the marchers were gathering. It was eight o’clock—three and a half hours before the march was scheduled to move from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—and around the Ellipse, the huge plot of grass between the White House grounds and the lawn of the Washington Monument, there were only about half a dozen buses...

"I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin."

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in U.S. history.

King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963.

Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again...

The New York Times Web site was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon after an online attack on the company’s domain name registrar. The attack also forced employees of The Times to take care in sending e-mails.

The hacking was just the latest of a major media organization, with The Financial Times and The Washington Post also having their operations disrupted within the last few months. It was also the second time this month that the Web site of The New York Times was unavailable for several hours...

Eric Kulberg was an 18-year-old intern in the summer of 1963 when he asked his boss for the day off so he could attend the March on Washington.

“What are you, a n----- lover or something?” Kulberg’s superior at the Department of Interior asked.

“Uh-huh. I guess so,” Kulberg blurted out.

The exchange between Kulberg and his boss, who was also white, didn’t sway the young man’s resolve to march. After the boss told him, “Go ahead — you’ll have a job when you get back,” Kulberg took his Argus C3 camera and Kodachrome film to the roof of the Interior building to take photographs of the buses rolling in. Then he joined the crowd walking around the Tidal Basin toward the Lincoln Memorial, one of between 75,000 and 95,000 white people who joined the swelling, predominantly black crowd...

In the world's second-largest refugee camp, Syrians find that it's not easy to flee the war.

Early on a summer morning in the Jordanian desert, driving along an empty road toward the Syrian border. A skeletal hound limps by the roadside. An old man selling melons and coffee slumps on a crate and watches the dog. It’s in the nineties already, and dust is everywhere. A gust picks up, and your lips are filmed with a gritty scum. After a few miles, signs start appearing for the crossings into Syria. In the villages here at night, you can sometimes hear the sounds of artillery fire thudding across the frontier...

The sounds made lately by curfew violators here are mostly not shouts or gunshots, but the clacking of dice on wooden backgammon boards, the clicking of dominoes on cafe tables crowded with hookahs and grumbling fueled by years of upheaval.

When the conversation turns to politics, the predominant topic is a surprise to American ears: the conspiracy between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy Egypt.

However crackpot that view may sound, it is widespread among supporters of the military, which ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last month...

Somewhere in West Tennessee, not far from Graceland, nine women -- or "The 9 Nanas," as they prefer to be called -- gather in the darkness of night. At 4am they begin their daily routine -- a ritual that no one, not even their husbands, knew about for 30 years. They have one mission and one mission only: to create happiness. And it all begins with baked goods...

For her project Sworn Virgins of Albania, photographer Jill Peters visited to the mountain villages of northern Albania to capture portraits of “burneshas,” or females who have lived their lives as men for reasons related to their culture and society.

Many of the women assumed their male identities from an early age as a way to avoid the old codes that governed the tribal clans, which stated that women were the property of their husbands...