Arts & Culture

Each year, the Memorial Church offers the gift of song to the Harvard and Cambridge communities, with two moving services of carols. The Dec. 17 service is scheduled for 8 p.m.

D.T. Max, author of a new biography of David Foster Wallace, sat down with professor and critic James Wood to discuss the writer’s legacy and his brief time at Harvard, a catalyst for the breakdown and recovery that inspired much of Wallace’s masterpiece, “Infinite Jest.”

In a question-and-answer session, Stephen Mitchell, Harvard professor of Scandinavian and folklore, explores the lasting appeal and the inspirations behind author J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic tale “The Hobbit.” Director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the book for the big screen opens in the United States mid-December.

Delivering Harvard Divinity School’s Ingersoll Lecture at Sanders Theatre, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison discussed concepts of good and evil in her work and that of her contemporaries.

A film and a discussion at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library highlight Girls Rock Camp, which teaches girls and young women during summer sessions to find their inner musicians, shed some inhibitions, and celebrate themselves.

Harvard’s Semitic Museum is employing a high-tech response to the destruction of 3,300-year-old figures, using 3-D scanning to repair a ceramic lion that was damaged by the Assyrians.

Screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner sat down with President Drew Faust to dissect Abraham Lincoln’s legacy and talk history, politics, and writing after a Harvard-sponsored screening of his new biopic, “Lincoln.”

During a sometimes tongue-in-cheek lecture on Wednesday, Professor David Carrasco discussed the historical origins of humankind’s periodic preoccupations with the apocalypse.

Harvard alumnus T.S. Eliot published 10 poems in the student-run literary magazine The Harvard Advocate between 1907 and 1910, including the one below.

Harvard Professor Ingrid Monson during a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is exploring the music of Malian Neba Solo.

“Cartographic Grounds,” an exhibit of new and old mapmaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, intends to inspire a new generation of designers to draw, with precision, what they see, and to present, with art, what they imagine.

A recent Radcliffe symposium explored the history and future of note taking.

David McCann, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, is spreading his love of sijo, a poetic form.

A show by artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, which examines issues of family and the Afro-Latin experience in America, opened Thursday at the Neil L. & Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Author Steven Pinker told a packed audience what is wrong with so much academic writing: It’s filled with abstract language, clunky transitions, clichés, “zombie nouns,” and “compulsive hedging.”

Harvard’s newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection is the largest of its kind in the world, centuries of art, literature, and popular culture artifacts related to the chief avenues to altered states of mind: sex and drugs.

Three local jazz figures came to Harvard to explore their passion for the music and its future as a singular American art form.

Artist Kerry James Marshall’s massive woodcut print, on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, challenges the artistic status quo.

Radcliffe graphic designer Jessica Brilli does what she loves and loves what she does, using her artistic talent in her personal and professional life. A reception will be held Nov. 8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

French historian Roger Chartier, whose work examines the history of books, publishing, and reading, explored the creation of literary archives and the appearance in the 1750s of authorial manuscripts during a talk at Radcliffe. “Take Note” will “consider the past and future of note taking on Nov. 1 and 2.

Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem “Hidden Lake.”

Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem “While Josh Sleeps.”

Poet Josh Bell, the new Briggs-Copeland lecturer, calls on the spirit of rocker Vince Neil in his latest poems.

More than 30 collaborators, including four Harvard undergrads, take the stage in the American Repertory Theater’s (A.R.T.) production of “The Lily’s Revenge,” at Oberon through Oct. 28.

“A Storied Legacy: Correspondence and Early Writings of Joseph Story,” online and at Harvard Law School, goes deep into the life and work of the scholar, best-selling author, and Supreme Court justice.

Works by Le Corbusier and Joan Miró are back at the Carpenter Center after painstaking repair work by conservators at the Weissman Preservation Center.

Participants in a Harvard panel drew from their own experiences in a look at life for mixed-race families in the U.S.: “American Masala: Race Mixing, the Spice of Life or Watering Down Cultures?”

Cultural historian and author Joseph Horowitz offered hope for the future of classical music orchestras in the form of innovative partnerships and collaborations.

The stone sculpture “Gilgamesh” by the late Professor Dimitri Hadzi, who died in 2006, was donated to Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum by his wife, Cynthia.

“Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea,” at Gund Hall through Oct. 16, is a room-filling, eye-filling Kiyonori Kikutake retrospective.