Arts

Ally Carter is the author of the Gallagher Girls series and Heist Society.

Teenage girls read in packs. It's true today, and it was true when I was a teen growing up in a small town in northeast Oklahoma. Battered paperback copies swept through our ranks like wildfire, but the one I will never forget is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

Some children's book illustrators might not have gotten a lot of sleep over the weekend. That's because they might have been wondering if this could be the year they win one of the grand prizes of children's literature: the Randolph Caldecott Medal.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the Caldecott, which is given to the most distinguished children's picture book of the year. The winner is being named Monday morning at a meeting of the American Library Association.

The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

The movie that rapper-actor Common, whose credits include Brown Sugar, American Gangster, Just Wright and LUV — currently playing in theaters — could watch a million times is John Landis' Coming to America.

In 1962, a grisly double murder on a deserted stretch of desert rocked a small community outside Phoenix.

A young couple had been shot to death in a case that stumped Maricopa County investigators. Then, something happened that should have cracked it wide open: A man named Ernest Valenzuela confessed to the crime. But police didn't pursue the lead, just one misstep in an investigation and eventual trial that were rife with irregularities.

This week marks an important milestone for anyone who swoons at the very mention of Mr. Darcy. Pride and Prejudice is turning 200, and to celebrate its bicentennial, cartoonist Jen Sorensen drew up an illustrated version of the classic.

The longest-running Broadway musical ever, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, celebrated Saturday another milestone: its 25th anniversary.

When it all started Jan. 26, 1988, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, a gallon of gas cost about 90 cents and a ticket to The Phantom of the Opera was a whopping $50. It was the hottest ticket in town.

Times have changed, prices have changed, but that disfigured, tortured genius who haunts the Paris Opera House, creating havoc and causing the chandelier to fall, has endured.