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Author and historian Dennis McNally has written extensively on the Grateful Dead, including the 2002 authorized biography “A Long Strange Trip.” In his new book, “The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties,” McNally (who also served as the Dead’s publicist in the 1980s and 1990s) looks at the larger cultural moment that the band was part of. This excerpt looks at the story of the first Be-In, which featured a performance by the Dead for an audience full of counterculture luminaries.

At 1 p.m. on Jan.

Image Source: Everett Collection

If you're looking for a chilling thriller to help you avoid the chilly weather, I Am the Night might be just what the doctor ordered. The six-part TNT miniseries stars Chris Pine and portrays the real-life events of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder - but that's just the beginning.

If you're not familiar with the story, then you probably want a little background before you start watching. Nicknamed "the Black Dahlia," Elizabeth Short was a 22-year-old waitress and aspiring actress living in Los Angeles when she was found brutally murdered in a vacant lot near Leimert Park in 1947, her body cut in half and severely mutilated. The Black Dahlia's killer was never found, making her murder one of the oldest, most infamous cold case files in Los Angeles history.

Chris Pine's I Am the Night character - a reporter named Jay Singletary investigating the case - is totally fictional,...

Music and Sex: Scenes from a life - A novel in progress (first chapter here). Warning: more highly graphic Tmi.

A weekend of fruitless fretting almost led Walter to agree that Martial had the right idea and the show should go on with no guitarist, and with just Walter on keyboards, but really all he'd come up with for sure was a new band name -- The Living Section, for the Wednesday arts portion of The New York Times. The other guys all agreed that was an improvement. However, he couldn't bring himself to propose to them what, in his head, he had dubbed the Martial Plan.

The thing about the band was, it had to be fit in between all the stuff that going to college was actually about, such as attending classes. So on Monday, it was back to the usual schedule, which meant one of his favorite...

Marian Seldes, the Tony Award-winning star of A Delicate Balance who was a teacher of Kevin Kline and Robin Williams, a muse to playwright Edward Albee and a Guinness Book of World Records holder for most consecutive performances, died Monday at age 86. She died peacefully at her home after an extended illness, her brother Timothy Seldes said. "It is with deep sadness that I share the news that my dear sister Marian Seldes has died," he said in a statement. "She was an extraordinary woman whose great love of the theater, teaching and acting was surpassed only by her deep love for her family.

Mercedes Ruehl is returning to Broadway after a seven-year absence, starring in Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Richard Greenberg's The American Plan, a 1990 play set in a 1960s Catskills resort. Ruehl plays Eva Adler, a highly intelligent German woman who's obsessively involved with her emotionally unstable daughter (Lily Rabe). Eva isn't easy to play, and that's why Ruehl likes her. The character is a far cry from Stevie, the stunned, enraged, belittled wife in Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, Ruehl's last show on Broadway. She's even further removed from the sweet, mentally limited Bella in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers, for which Ruehl won a Tony Award. In playing Eva, Ruehl finds herself influenced by Irene Worth, who portrayed Bella's mother -- a figure not unlike Eva. "There are certain inflections, and the way I hold my mouth," she says in describing the similarities.