Montreal may be better known for snow than style, but two new openings are indicative of the city's transformation into a serious cultural contender. The most eye-catching arrival is "From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk," a first-of-its-kind retrospective of the work of French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. On display through Oct. 2 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the show traces Gaultier's 35-year career, from his nautical-inspired collections in the 1980s to his costumes for ...

In Hollywood, they say, any bureaucrat can give the thumbs-down to a film proposal, but the ones with real clout are those who can flash a thumbs-up and make it happen. That power used to be the exclusive preserve of the studio moguls. Not anymore. While studios still control the financing, today the man with the golden thumb is Michael Ovitz, an agent and martial-arts buff who works in quiet but irresistible ways. Nearly everyone in show business agrees that ...

At least four performers were injured doing the technically demanding stunts. Opening night had to be delayed repeatedly as the show was being worked on. The critics slammed the show even before it was finished. Finally, most ignominiously, director Julie Taymor was ousted in March, as a new creative team was brought in to make major revisions in the Broadway musical that had become a late-night TV punch line. When Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark finally opened ...

What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation . He's working on a version for the lay reader, due out in ...

The evil Lord Shen has just introduced gunpowder to China and plans to aim it at the country's greatest martial artists, a group that implausibly includes a pudgy panda bear named Po . Po's teacher Shifu considers this a revolting development; as he observes mournfully, "This could be the end of kung fu." And the panda, a late bloomer in the discipline, whines, "But I just got kung fu!" When the DreamWorks animation auteurs get ...

Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2003, a Phoenix housewife named Stephenie Meyer had a dream: a young woman was talking to a beautiful, sparkling man in a sunlit meadow. The man was a vampire. They were in love, and he was telling the girl how hard it was for him to keep from killing her. Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes. ...

A chill wind is blowing through Mitte, the once drab district in central Berlin that is fast becoming hangout central for the world's creative types. Davide Grazioli, used to warmer climes, pulls his black woolly hat over his head and strides up Kastanien Allee — now dubbed Casting Alley because of all the wannabe film directors and actors who frequent its cafs. Grazioli is an Italian artist whose work includes unraveled embroideries from India and skulls made of organic ...

An Army vet helping other veterans struggling with addiction, a drummer providing free music education to New Orleans students and a bartender providing clean water to communities worldwide are among the Top 10 CNN Heroes of 2009. Roy Foster's Stand Down House has provided life-changing services to nearly 900 veterans since 2000. Derrick Tabb's Roots of Music program is giving more than 100 young people an alternative to New Orleans streets. And Doc Hendley's nonprofit Wine to Water has ...

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission issued a finding of probable cause Tuesday that racism was involved in the decision last June by a suburban Philadelphia swim club to revoke privileges of a largely minority day care center. The commission ordered monetary damages for humiliation and embarrassment and a civil penalty of not more than $50,000. The decision noted that none of the club's 155 paid members this year was African-American. Last year, according to the decision, there were "179 paid ...

It's a good time to have an iPhone, be moderately geeky, and live in New York. That's because loads of iPhone apps have come out that make the urban experience more rewarding. And it's not just iPhone apps. A slew of tech offerings are improving life, work, and getting around in big cities. That might be said of some smaller cities and towns as well, but major cities have, among other advantages, the population densities and demographics many ...