Daniel Chester French’s solemn white marble sculpture of Lincoln has presided over history since its 1922 dedication. A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., looks at its creation.

Crafty people often make useful things out of stuff normally headed for the trash heap, but rarely do their creations spell fame and financial success. Unless, of course, you’re Tim Anderson, a rock star of the DIY crowd.

Around the same time that hippies were enjoying their “three days of peace and love” at Yasgur’s Farm in Bethel, N.Y., there was another huge music festival staged south of Woodstock — in Harlem. What’s become known as “Black Woodstock” was a concert series that featured B.B. King, The Staples Singers, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone and an estimated 100,000 concert-goers.

Increasing gentrification in Berlin is putting the city’s famous and raucous alternative art scene at risk. Artists who have squatted in a ramshackle building for nearly 20 years now face eviction by corporate owners who want to turn the site into high-end apartments.

Our contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We’ll post a favorite story weekly at NPR.org and The New Yorker’s James Wood will pick our winner to read on-air.

This fall, Philadelphia’s skateboarders, bicyclists and inline skaters will have to either pocket their cell phones or use hands-free devices, making the city the first in the nation to extend the measure to include non-motorists. While that might be a grind for some of the city’s wheeled residents, others are cheering the move.

When last we saw the ad men and women of AMC’s Mad Men, the firm had just been bought by a British company and the Cuban missile crisis was underway. Critic David Bianculli offers a sneak peak at what additional drama the new season might hold.

John Updike tended to let his characters age with him, and his final group of short stories, My Father’s Tears, is no exception. He wrote of characters who are “taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead.”

In the mid-1980s in California, at a time when few people wanted to talk about race, Richard Montoya was laughing about it. His thought-provoking performances with the group Culture Clash over the past 25 years have cracked up audiences, and changed some minds.

The Tony award-winning musical Next To Normal portrays a family struggling with mental illness and the treatments offered by modern psychiatry — with rock songs about Valium and bipolar disorder.