There must be a German word for it: That feeling of instant familiarity and creeping displacement that sets upon the young-middle-aged when they revisit a place of their not-so-distant youth. It could be their childhood bedroom. Or a once-favorite bar. Or the town where they went to college – like Carbondale, Ill., the setting for […]

Three summers ago in Austin, a thousand or so rising high school seniors participating in a mock legislature for youth leaders made national headlines, voting to secede from the Union. It was, of course, a toothless vote, made during an annual gathering known as Boys State, one of many such programs for precocious male adolescents […]

For more than a century, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘The Secret Garden,’ first published in 1911, has endured.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival continues with performances Sunday and Thursday.

Writer-director Amy Seimetz dredges up a queasily effective sense of impending doom in “She Dies Tomorrow,” a vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment. The film opens on the teary, bleary eye of an obviously distraught woman. It belongs to a character named Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), who has […]