Arts + Life

Just about every single day of her life, Amelia Rose Earhart — a former TV traffic-and-weather broadcaster in Denver — has had to answer this question: "Are you a pilot?"

For a long time, the answer was no.

Japanese-American activist Yuri Kochiyama has died of natural causes in Berkeley, Calif., at age 93. The lifelong champion of civil rights causes in the black, Latino, Native American and Asian-American communities died peacefully in her sleep Sunday morning, according to her family.

The second episode of Fargo, a TV show inspired by the 1996 Coen brothers film, opens ominously. A drum kit crashes as a beat-up old sedan speeds through snowy, rural Minnesota. Two hit men, known simply as Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench, are investigating a murder.

The two communicate with American Sign Language. Actor Russell Harvard, the kinetic presence behind Mr. Wrench, was born deaf.

He's been acting since he was a child.

One of the most unsettling rooms in an important art exhibit at New York's Neue Galerie is a room in which numerous empty frames are hanging, with guesses about which paintings might have been in them. The paintings themselves were all lost or destroyed by the Nazis. Encouraged by Hitler, most Nazis (Joseph Goebbels was the rare exception) considered everything but the most hidebound, traditionally realistic paintings and sculptures to be "degenerate," a threat to the Aryan ideals of German culture.

Poet, performer and political activist Maya Angelou has died after a long illness at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86. Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou grew up in a segregated society that she worked to change during the civil rights era. Angelou, who refused to speak for much of her childhood, revealed the scars of her past in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of a series of memoirs.

Kara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.

If you've ever been to a national park and stopped off in the gift shop, you may have seen drawings of iconic park sights for sale as posters or post cards. The brightly colored print reproductions showcase the parks' impressive vistas, such as Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser and the Grand Canyon's overlooks.

A death, a divorce, a song and dance number and a sale; must be the end of another Mad Men season.

Creator Matt Weiner has a reputation for ending seasons on a melodramatic note. And even though this year's run of Mad Men episodes was cut in half by AMC to set the series finale next year, Sunday's "Waterloo" still managed to close 2014's seven-episode run with a jolt.

When we posted the first Art in a Jar in April, we learned a couple of lessons: 1) Folks liked the idea. 2) The puzzle was way too easy.

So we try, try again.

The Puzzle

The challenge: Guess the masterpiece — by looking at its pieces — in the jar.

Please post your guesses in the comments section.

The Expert

Should you kill one person in order to save five?

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We're going to take a moment now to talk about a word - yep, one word. Maybe you use it all the time, or maybe you hear people use the word, and it drives you up the wall. I'm talking about the word literally.

Did you know the theme music to Jurassic Park has lyrics?

Well, according to Jeff Goldblum, who played "Dr. Ian Malcolm" in the film, here they are:

In Jurassic Park
Scary in the dark
I'm so scared that I'll be eaten.

At least that's what Goldblum said — or, rather, sang — at a recent performance of the jazz show he plays in Los Angeles almost every week. He's been playing there since the 1990s.

You start with difference, with mystery. Some things spiral, some become spheres, some branch, some don't. We know that inert atoms quicken, become bees, goats, clouds, then dissolve back into randomness. We look at these things, all these very, very different things, and we wonder, are they really different, or is every thing we see one thing, expressed differently? Does the universe have rules? How many? Could there be a single generating principle, a oneness?

In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, "nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor's house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago," Oliveira says.

You can't miss 'em. Baby pictures have flooded so many Instagram and Facebook feeds that an app is now available to block them, if you want. But as the newness of social media collides with an experience as old as time — motherhood — researchers are beginning to study its sociological and psychological impacts.

Los Angeles blogger Rebecca Woolf uses her blog, Girl's Gone Child, as a window into her family's life. Naturally, it includes oodles of pictures of her four children.

She says she's probably taken tens of thousands of photos since her oldest child was born. And she remembers the moment when it suddenly clicked — if you will — that she was too absorbed in digital documentation.

Norman Rockwell's The Rookie has sold for $22.5 million at auction Thursday. The 1957 painting of baseball players in a locker room was sold by Christie's auction house — heady heights for a work that first appeared on a magazine that sold for 15 cents.

Update at 12:50 p.m. The Final Price

While the "hammer price" of the Rockwell painting was $20 million, Christie's says the painting's final price is $22,565,000, reflecting a buyer's premium. We've updated this post to reflect the auction house's final calculation.

Brothers Charles and David Koch are the subject of the new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. The author, Daniel Schulman, describes the Kochs as having pumped hundreds of millions into remaking the American political landscape, trying to bring their libertarian views into the mainstream.

Fads sweep across America like thunderstorms.

I don't know how I missed this (yes, yes I do) but the life-size wax figure of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was unveiled last week.

As you can see here, the wax Zuckerberg is dressed in his signature hoodie, sitting barefoot with his legs crossed and his laptop in his lap. Mashable reports: