Shop for Children

Val Castronovo writes: Since its founding in 2010, Pinterest, the photo-sharing site that has become the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter, has been enthusiastically embraced by art museums across the country. A virtual bulletin board, Pinterest allows users — more than 70 million now — to set up “boards” to which they “pin” images of favorite things — in this case, artworks and artifacts culled from museum collections and archives. more »

The creators of Roominate, Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, didn’t grow up playing with traditional girl toys. When Brooks asked for a Barbie her father gave her a mini-saw. Chen adored Legos and built hundreds of extravagant creations with her brothers. Brooks majored in mechanical engineering at MIT, while Bettina studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. When they met as graduate students at Stanford, said Chen, “We thought that there’d be a lot more women in grad school, but there weren’t.” more »

Authors and poets Margaret Atwood, Marie Arana, Taylor Branch, Don DeLillo, Khaled Hosseini, Barbara Kingsolver, Brad Meltzer, Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Paterson and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be among writers speaking. New Library of Congress exhibits celebrate opera, the majestic art form that has transfixed audiences for more than 400 years, and the other exhibit celebrates what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history." more »

Oakland Museum of California opened the vaults to showcase the very best in California landscape art from the museum’s holdings, including works by Ansel Adams, Thomas Hill, David Hockney, William Keith, Arthur Mathews, Richard Misrach, Thomas Moran, and more. Peter Stackpole: Bridging the Bay features stunning black-and-white photographs chronicling the original San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge construction in the 1930s by a famed American photographer. more »