Don't be alarmed when you hear an unexpected sound echoing through the canyons of Manhattan in the coming days—it's probably just laughter. On November 6, the 10th annual New York Comedy Festival kicks off four days of live performances, presentations, panels and music from some of the biggest ... More

Pick-up artists, improv, Twitter and cave trout: There's nearly no topic that The Point magazine won't take on in its scholarly, sharp and incredibly accessible pages. Founders and PhD candidates at the University of Chicago, Jon Baskin, Etay Zwick and Jonny Thakkar released the first issue of the ... More

Hugh Jackman is known for being many things—singer, Broadway star, action movie hero—but coffee purveyor? It's true. Since 2010, Jackman, via his Laughing Man label, has been producing organic and fair-trade coffee, tea and hot chocolate. During a trip to Ethiopia, Jackman came to believe that unique products ... More

In Big Sur, out November 1, Kate Bosworth takes a turn as Billie, the long-suffering mistress of Josh Lucas’ Neal Cassady and mistreated intended of Jean-Marc Barr’s Jack Kerouac. Billie doesn’t catch many breaks. Bosworth, on the other hand, got exceptionally lucky in love on the film; she married Michael ... More

It’s an uphill battle for a movie about the slow, sad demise of a family to be considered can’t-miss. Somehow filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen’s Broken Circle Breakdown manages, though, with an appealing mix of humor, pathos and, believe it or not, classic country songs. Over the course of the ... More

It's no easy task getting into one of Grant Achatz's critically lauded, forever-packed Chicago restaurants Alinea and Next, but getting up close and personal with the chef is a much less daunting prospect. This week, Achatz gets the big-screen treatment in Spinning Plates, a documentary following ... More

Spanning a New York City block below the Maritime Hotel, the pan-Asian restaurant TAO Downtown is hoping to attract a real cross-section of customers both familiar and unfamiliar with the brand. Since its midtown Manhattan and Las Vegas openings in 2000 and 2005 respectively, TAO has ... More

"David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition" is just that—bigger. The intensely personal retrospective spanning fourteen years of work opens October 26 at San Francisco's de Young Museum and fills 18,000 square feet of gallery space with the artist's drawings, paintings, digital "Cubist movies" and the results of his experimentation ... More

When Evan Jonigkeit takes the stage on October 24 for the world premiere of playwright Sharr White's The Snow Geese, he'll be entering an entirely different world. The show, which stars Mary Louise Parker, centers on a family in upstate New York, circa 1917, that gathers for an ... More

From a devious political operative on Scandal to a doing-his-best dad on The Carrie Diaries, Matt Letscher's had his share of wide-ranging and highly visible parts recently. Now with films including Her, with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, and Devil's Knot, with Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth, the ... More