Arts & Culture

Here are twenty books, movies, TV shows, and video games with notably positive and/or philosophically valuable messages to help you pass the time, keep your mind active, and keep your spiritual fuel tank full.

Charles Portis’s novel is a story filled with memorable characters and stimulating action that treats serious themes with lighthearted yet benevolent wit. For readers looking to explore the Western genre of the great American canon, True Grit is a true classic.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a firecracker of a woman with a studied yet eclectic taste in art and the means to acquire lots of it. As one friend put it, she lived “at a rate and intensity, with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”

In Heroes, Legends, Champions, Andrew Bernstein has created a fascinating hybrid of useful philosophy and inspirational vignettes about outstanding men and women. The result is a book that can help people rise to heroic heights in their own lives.

Miami Beach boasts the world’s greatest concentration of art deco buildings, which reflect a distinct era in American history—along with the can-do attitude that has defined the nation.

Michael Jackson was no child molester. The facts simply don’t support that horrific accusation. His acquittal in 2005 was the only evidence-based and morally defensible outcome.

Often scorned and rejected in her own day, Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneering writer who looked beyond the controversies of her time and sought to articulate a lasting vision of life—one free of bitterness or pettiness and full of grace and beauty.

What the sun can do for reality, poetry can do for life. It can inspire us with ideals, reveal the depth beyond the surface, burnish our lives with beauty, turn the simple into the sacred, and make us aspire past what things are to what they might be.

So miserable was my pre-Goodkind, pre-Rand life, that had I not discovered their works, I might be dead today.

Madison Cunningham, just twenty-five, already has proven herself a consummate artist with the power to fuse melody, meaning, and an eclectic blend of musical styles to create grand works that can still fairly be described as pop songs.