Living in Los Angeles, the media sensory overload of conspicuously consuming celebrities can drive students into added debt for the hottest item on the rack of Fred Segal, or, on the other extreme, force penny-pinching students to become jaded and opt for the California uniform of comfortable denim and flip flops. Read more...

It’s not unusual for fifth-year ethnomusicology student Jonathan Keyes to take a 6 a.m. flight across the country, play a show at a college campus, and then catch a flight to Los Angeles the next morning so he can get back in time for class. Read more...

Eugene Hütz is like a wedding singer, birthday party clown and Jackass cast member rolled into one skinny Ukrainian man with a handle-bar moustache. With acrobatic flips, magic tricks and an indulgence in harming equipment and himself to embellish his rough musical act, the frontman of Gogol Bordello violently stretches the role of a singer. Read more...

When today’s music fans make the effort to catch their favorite band live, they often expect a rendition, if not an exact duplication, of the group’s latest album. Read more...

Politically outspoken musicians are always a cause for controversy. But if there was ever one American musician to represent the American ideal of achievement in the face of hardship and public condemnation, it would have been human rights activist and opera singer Paul Robeson, one of America’s most persecuted activists due to alleged ties to the Communist Party in the 1940s and ’50s. Read more...

There seems to be no limit to the rise of poker madness, and UCLA is cashing in on the craze Read more...

Back in the 1990s, members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blackjack team jetted off to Las Vegas and hustled casinos out of millions of dollars using borderline illegal card-counting techniques. Read more...