By Ron Charles for the Washington Post

In the words of King Lear, today we learn “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.”

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington has selected the sites for its most ambitious exhibition ever: a traveling tour of First Folios that will stop in every state, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (#SHX400), the 2016 tour has been designed in partnership with the Cincinnati Museum Center and the American Library Association.

Hundreds of hopeful libraries, museums, historical societies and other cultural venues submitted applications for a chance to host a free four-week display of a First Folio from the Folger’s incomparable collection. This morning, the winners, “chosen from above,/ By inspiration of celestial grace,” were announced. (See full list below. Exact dates for each stop will be announced this spring.)

Here in Washington, Gallaudet University earned the honor of displaying the Folger’s traveling First Folio, one of the most valuable printed books in the world. In Maryland, the book will stop at St. John’s College in Annapolis. And Virginians can see the First Folio at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Like the United States Senate, the design of this tour favors the population of small states. Almost everyone in tiny Rhode Island will be within walking distance of the First Folio visiting Brown University in Providence. But millions of Californians will have to travel hundreds of miles south to see the rare book in San Diego, where the public library will be hosting the First Folio with the Old Globe, one of the nation’s oldest Shakespeare theaters.

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By Mallory ODonoghue for Connecticut Public Radio

As March Madness tips off on Tuesday, excitement over college basketball can be seen everywhere on UConn’s Storrs campus.

Nowhere is the creative energy around basketball culture more apparent on campus than at the exhibit “In the Paint: Basketball in Contemporary Art” at the William Benton Museum of Art.

The display explores the symbolism and history of basketball, which is inextricably part of UConn’s culture. With nine NCAA Tournament wins for the women’s team, and four championship rings for the men’s, UConn is a staple for many a basketball fan’s “brackets.”

This year, the UConn men’s tournament hopes are over after their upsetting defeat to Southern Methodist University.

But it’s quite a different story for the Connecticut women. The returning champions have been ranked as a number one seed, and are one of the teams to watch.

UConn basketball moves from the court to the gallery space in a variety of mediums at “In the Paint.” Fans, fashionistas, and political junkies alike will enjoy the display of basketball apparel, from a pair of special edition Husky Nikes of gigantic proportions, to Barack Obama’s own UConn women’s basketball jersey, signed by the commander-in-chief himself.

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By Alan Bisbort for CTNOW

While we ponder the recent sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s end, another conflict’s anniversary looms. This one nearly touched off a second civil war — on American college campuses, in the streets and on The Mall in Washington, D.C.

That conflict, the so-called Vietnam War, ended on April 30, 1975, when a helicopter landed on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to remove the remaining American personnel and leave desperate civilians clinging to the ascending chopper’s landing gear. That conflict, never an officially declared war, was an 11-year experiment in “anti-communism” by the U.S. Congress, which unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, and the President (Johnson, then Nixon), who was given carte blanche by the resolution.

That uncivil war is the backdrop to “Remembering the Vietnam War,” a provocative, if limited, exhibition at the William Benton Museum at UConn-Storrs. Because the Benton is a museum of art, the objects on view are protest posters, photographs, handbills, original paintings and photomontages inspired by the dissent that roiled the nation and saw a sitting president react with seeming indifference to the death of four college students at Kent State University and pardon the man responsible for the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

“Remembering the Vietnam War” is dominated by artists, or art collectives, that did not sign their work. In fact, the most effective work here is anonymous: “America Eats Her Young” (a black-and-white silkscreen that riffs on Goya’s horrific “Saturn Devouring His Young”); “Stop the War” (riffing on Picasso’s “Guernica”); “American Gothic” (a satire using Grant Wood’s iconic painting); “Johnson’s Johnson” (a creepy drawing of an LBJ statue with no genitals); “Four More Years?” (which uses a photograph from My Lai to make its gory point). Most of these artifacts are taken from UConn’s stellar Poras Collection of Vietnam War Memorabilia.

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Benton Museum Public Relations Intern Rachel Berliner had the opportunity recently to interview award-winning cookbook writer Dorie Greenspan prior to her program here on Thursday, March 5^th from 5-6:30. The free event will include a talk and book signing followed by a dessert tasting of several recipes from her latest book, Baking Chez Moi. She will sign only those books purchased at the Benton. All proceeds from the book sale will go to the Museum’s Exhibition Fund.

What first interested you in baking?
When I look back, I see that I might have gotten interested in baking for all the wrong reasons, chief among them, playing to the crowd. I got married when I was in college and had neither baked nor cooked before we set up house. Cooking was a necessity – we couldn’t afford to eat out – and it was a skill I was looking forward to acquiring, mostly because I wanted to have bunches of friends around the table as often as possible. It didn’t take me long to realize that if I’d spent an entire day preparing dinner, as I often did, it was dessert that garnered the biggest grins.

And so I began to put more effort into baking and soon discovered that not only were my husband and friends happy, but I was too: I loved baking! I loved everything about it, from the basic ingredients and the process of working with them to serving and enjoying them. What fascinated me then and what continues to delight me is the magic of baking. Flour, sugar, butter and eggs are pretty much the foundations of baking, but they can be transformed into thousands of things. And each transformation is something to share and just about always something that makes people feel happy and cared for.

What do you consider the primary difference between American and French desserts?
Exuberance! American desserts often have more of everything than French desserts. American desserts are sweeter than their French counterparts, they’re richer, more elaborate, more decorated and bigger by a lot. For the most part, French desserts are more restrained. And they’re always served in smaller portions.

During the time you worked with Julia Child, what was the best baking advice she ever gave you?
It’s odd, but Julia never gave me any baking advice. She did, however, give me a piece of fashion advice that I took and have followed ever since. Julia told me to always wear lipstick! And I do.

What are your favorite desserts from the book?
I always find this a near-impossible question to answer. Since I choose all of the recipes that go into my books, it goes without saying that I love them all. But, with every book, a couple of recipes become my go-to choices.

With Baking Chez Moi, the two recipes that I use over and over again are: Custardy Apple Squares, a cross between a cake and a pudding that can be made on the spur of the moment; and Laurent’s Slow-Roasted Spiced Pineapple, a boozy dessert that can be fancy or plain, served solo or accompanied by a cookies.

What dessert would you recommend for a first-time baker?
I often recommend the Custardy Apple Squares because they are easy to make, naturally beautiful (no decoration needed), created from ingredients most of us have on hand most of the time and, of course, they’re delicious.

But I’m a believer in love-at-first-sight: If you see a picture that speaks to you or the name of a recipe that makes you dream, bake it! Only a handful of the recipes in Baking Chez Moi are complicated and, besides, even imperfect desserts are good desserts. Baking something at home and sharing it trumps little mistakes and mishaps.

What or who inspired your recipes in Baking Chez Moi?
I was, as I have been for years, inspired by France, its food and its traditions, and by my friends and neighbors in Paris. Because I have been living in Paris for almost 20 years, and because I have such wonderful and generous friends, I was able to write about an aspect of French pâtisserie that’s rarely revealed: French comfort baking, the kind of baking that French people do at home for their families and their closest friends. Discovering this style of baking was like uncovering a parallel universe.

What’s coming next?
I’m working on a cookie cookbook. The book doesn’t have a title yet – titles are so hard! – but it does have a deadline: I must finish my manuscript by July 1, so that the book can be published next fall. Stop by my house anytime between now and my deadline and you’re bound to find every surface of the kitchen covered with cookie-filled cooling racks.

For more about Dorie Greenspan’s food adventures, please visit www.doriegreenspan.com