THEATER: Hemingway’s play The Fifth Column takes its now-familiar name from the Spanish Civil War, when General Emilio Mola, advancing on Madrid with four columns of troops, boasted of a hidden “fifth column” of fascist sympathizers waiting within the city. Hemingway, of course, was there for the action as a newspaper correspondent and dashed off the play while fascists bombarded his hotel. His rarely produced drama tells the “surprisingly funny story of the private......

READING: It's the first Tuesday of the month, which means...there's a Sci-Fi reading! "Now In its 19th year, the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series has showcased some of the most prominent and upcoming authors in the genre. However, the series' commitment to providing a venue as an ongoing science fiction reading series in New York City, is open to all works of speculative fiction, whether they be works of fantasy, magical realism,......

THEATER: Gertrude Stein is regarded as an avant-garde intellectual whose adventurous prose has long overshadowed her plays – despite her Broadway hit Four Saints in Three Acts. (Who could forget?) A crack team of downtown experimental theater types are now hoisting six of Stein’s one-acts out of obscurity with a production in the East Village. The evening, irresistibly dubbed Steinese Takeout, boldly embraces Stein’s radicalism and runs with it. How radical are these plays? “How......

THEATER: The Mint Theater, which has earned a formidable reputation by yanking old, forgotten plays out of oblivion, has struck gold again with their latest production of John Ferguson, an intense melodrama about a poor Irishman who will lose his farm unless his daughter marries some creepy tool. A 1919 edition of The Times called it a “smashing play”; 87 years later the Gray Lady stays regular with “thoroughly engrossing”. 7:00 p.m. // The Mint......

Okay-- we really though the Sony Fony graffiti story had run its course. Surely, we thought, Sony couldn't do anything more silly than employing fake graffiti to advertise its PlayStationPortable. Sadly, we were wrong. LAist is reporting that Sony is now advertising on human skin, by co-opting those little stamps they use at clubs: The next time you go to a bar or venue that stamps your hand to get in, check that stamp out.......

Taking a play out of fashion industry's notebook, the U.S. Mint continues its effort to sex up its image by introducing not one but TWO new nickels next year, one for the spring, the other for fall. The nickels will still have Thomas Jefferson's profile, but the backs are new, both with events from Jefferson's presidency. The Spring Nickel celebrates the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States......