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This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel. He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded …

Why did Vincent van Gogh paint a skeleton smoking a cigarette? His 1886 painting doesn’t quite seem to fit into his larger output, one teeming with swirling landscapes and emotive portraits. Some art historians have said that “Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette” was merely van Gogh, still …

Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at …