Last week in its series on creativity, CNN profiled writer, composer, and multimedia artist Paul Miller ’92, aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid, who could be the spokesperson for the liberal arts. Miller intellectualizes and fuses apparently disparate images, sounds, and ideas, across genres to create new discoveries.

For instance, last fall, Miller introduced an audience at the New York Academy of Science to “Sinfonia Antartica” — a presentation of classical, electronic and go-go musical interpretations of physicist Brian Greene’s research. His 2011 book, The Book of Ice, presents charts, graphs, and alarming images of the effects of human-caused climate change that Miller noted on his 2008 expedition to Antarctica.

Brad Pitt in "The Tree of Life." Photo: Merie Wallace and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Steve ’70 and Paula Mae Schwartz were co-executive producers of last year’s The Tree of Life from director Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and was announced yesterday as a nominee for a Best Picture Academy Award.

Additional big news for the Schwartzes and their production company Chockstone Pictures came last week when it was announced that Chockstone and Nick Wechsler Productions purchased the rights to acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy’s first-ever spec script, The Counselor.

In 2009, Steve, Paula Mae, and colleague Nick Wechsler produced the film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel The Road, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other recent projects from the Schwartzes and Chockstone include the upcoming Cogan’s Trade, also starring Pitt.

You can’t tune into a media outlet lately and not run smack into Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has equally mesmerized and rankled fans and opponents this football season with his fourth quarter heroics and endzone prayers. Tebow’s improbable run through the NFL playoffs ended against the New England Patriots last weekend, but in the week leading up to that game, Owen Strachan ’03, a professor of theology and history at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, wondered in an essay for The Atlantic “Does God Care Whether Tim Tebow Wins on Saturday?”

Strachan’s piece covers “a theology of providence, suffering, and sports,” and made an impact with scholars and face-painters. For several days it was one of the most-read pieces on The Atlantic‘s site, it was featured in the “Nota Bene” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Arts & Letters Daily website, and it drew thousands of Facebook “likes” and hundreds of comments.

Abelardo Morell '71

In a new book, Penelope’s Hungry Eyes: Portraits of Photographers, photographer Abe Frajndlich focuses his lens on fellow celebrated photographers, including renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell ’71 (image #10 of the slideshow). The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will feature an exhibition this summer by another of the distinguished subjects from Frajndlich’s book, part-time Maine resident William Wegman (slide #15).

Singer-songwriter Sarah Ramey ’03, who goes by the stage name Wolf Larsen, recently debuted a new album, Quiet at the Kitchen Door, “and it is not your normal record release,” she says.

Sarah paired up with the social microloan site Kiva and The Girl Effect, a non-profit that seeks to abolish poverty for adolescent girls, to release the album “as an Idea, rather than as a record.” The idea—when you invest in a girl’s education, the entire community improves—takes shape through a video explaining The Girl Effect. “Not my idea,” Sarah admits, “UNESCO and The World Health Organization are the biggest proponents.”

Sarah is donating one-third of all proceeds from Quiet at the Kitchen Door to these two organizations that invest in education for girls, as well as microloans for women entrepreneurs through Kiva’s www.joinfite.org program.

This is not a women’s rights issue—it’s a human rights issue.

Otter Cliff in Maine's Acadia National Park.

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, all 397 National Parks are offering free admission this holiday weekend.

English can be a difficult language to learn, with seemingly no rhyme nor reason to myriad pronunciations.

The British website The Poke offers a poem that rivals the tongue twisters of America’s Dr. Seuss with the challenge, “If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90 percent of the native English speakers in the world.”

The State Department’s Foreign Service Institute compiles approximate learning expectations for its professional staff.

Of the 63 languages analyzed, finds the five most difficult to learn to be Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.

Photo by Karsten Moran '05

Comedian Hari Kondabolu ’04, who was the cover story subject of last summer’s Bowdoin magazine, recently embarked on a comedy tour of India with two other Indian-American comics.

The U.S. State Department is sponsoring the three-week, seven-city tour called “Make Chai, Not War,” and NPR’s All Things Considered featured Hari and his comedic compatriots this week.

Hari Kondabolu, from Queens, N.Y., is edgy and cerebral. One of his jokes likens a bad relationship with an aggressive English woman to the British colonization of India.

One of the hottest new shows on television focused recently on the heroics of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Bowdoin Class of 1852). “Homeland” is the story of Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who returns home eight years after going missing in Iraq, and Carrie Mathison, a driven—and possibly unstable—CIA officer who suspects Brody might be plotting an attack on America. The Showtime series, which has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, recently completed its first season and has been renewed for a second. In season one’s penultimate episode, Brody takes his wife and two teenage children to the battlefield at Gettysburg, where he describes Chamberlain’s leadership at Little Round Top. Later at the motel, Brody urges his son to be “brave and daring” in life, just like the leader of the 20th Maine.

Blogger Susan Stephenson ’02 is wearing the same dress every day for 30 days in January, changing the style of that one dress each day with various accessories, as a “charitable publicity stunt.” The dress was donated by L.L. Bean Signature, and all of the accessories are donated from local companies, fashion students, and artists, whose work Susan will showcase, blogging and vlogging about the project throughout the month. Susan’s aim is to help women in the difficult economy to look their best as they enter or re-enter the work force, and she will donate all of the featured fashion to Dress for Success Southern Maine, a Portland non-profit that helps women get back into the workplace.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art and director Kevin Salatino win high praise from Portland Press Herald art critic Daniel Kany, who calls “Edward Hopper’s Maine” “the most beloved show of the year” for 2011. The exhibition also made the paper’s list of the top ten arts and entertainment events in Maine.

What do Steve Jobs, the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake, Occupy Wall Street, Penn State, crazy weather, and Osama Bin Laden have in common? They all made headlines in 2011 and they’re all part of a stunning collection of photographs of the year about to end published in three parts by The Boston Globe.

The Year in Pictures – Part I

The Year in Pictures – Part II

The Year in Pictures – Part III

Associate Professor of English Brock Clarke and Chris Bowe, owner of Longfellow Books in Portland, share their favorite books of 2011 with Maine Public Broadcasting’s Keith Shortall ’82.

Photo courtesy of Scandinavian Wildlife Park.

The Huffington Post features new pictures of the über-photogenic polar bear cub, Siku.

Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Denmark is raising the month-old cub, which was removed from his mother after she failed to feed him.

Elizabeth Taylor’s legendary jewelry collection is on display and offered at auction at Christie’s in New York City. The iconic treasure trove of diamonds, pearls and gemstones tracing the movie star’s glamorous life is expected to fetch upwards of $30 million. Heather Johnson Barnhart ’88, U.S. Regional Director at Christie’s, offers background on the collection in a segment that aired on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What Thanksgiving gathering would be complete without a friendly game of touch football?

A pre-feast outing to the backyard already may be as much of the yearly tradition as that uncle with the lame jokes or those family members who always bicker. What? You know who you are.

Whether you’re seeking guidance for your first family football game, or merely looking to add some structure to your standing match-up, The Wall Street Journal offers its version of the rules, including:

11. Unless you live in California, Hawaii or Florida or some fancy place like that, the ground is probably going to be squishy with cold mud, and someone in your family is going to fall down face-first and ruin his or her Thanksgiving outfit. This is not cause for alarm. This is the highlight of the game.

24. Three-minute halftime. Don’t kill the momentum. Anything longer, and aging muscles seize up. Remember: if Daddy sits, Daddy is d-o-n-e. Read the complete list.