How a jazz pianist disappeared into his music.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!”

On the response to the Paris attacks.

Remembering jazz musician Ornette Coleman.

Kamel Daoud’s celebrated retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger came within two votes of winning the Prix Goncourt. It has also made him a target of radical Islamists.

On Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik and the rise of Islamophobia in Norway.

On the assassination of a half-Palestinian, half-Jewish cultural revolutionary.

How the icon’s personal struggles with identity fed his art.

A primer on Egypt’s political landscape.