Here's our compendium of pop-culture news you may have missed while you were doing more important things over the weekend.

After a four-decade career that has helped change the conversation about race and gender in America, Toni Morrison still has plenty left to say

Thad Ziolkowski is blond, lean, and I imagine he writes with a surfboard not far from his desk in his New York apartment. In 2003, Ziolkowski released On a Wave, a memoir documenting the return to his first love—surfing—years after abandoning the sport of his early teenage years in Florida for the writer's life in the city.

This week, Scott got to indulge his love of Amtrak trains as he headed to Maryland for the M3 Rock festival, featuring Ratt, Great White, Kix, LA Guns, Night Ranger, and host of other '8os and '90s bands.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as America was in the midst of multiple revolutions, Richard Avedon became the ultimate chronicler of the heroes and horrors of the time—and one of his signature methods was to let his subjects strip down and show themselves for who they really were. As the curtain rises on a new retrospective of the legendary photographer’s work this month at Gagosian Gallery, we celebrate the master portraitist’s unabashed exploration of the body politic—in all its ragged glory