Edith Zimmerman has written and editor for the likes of New York, GQ, Esquire, and others. Her big project the for the past year has been helming The Hairpin ...

The actress on fame, theater and that Nia Vardalos movie

The author of 'Then We Came to The End' never procrastinates

“I’mbackingmymum’scarintothedriveway. Hangononesecond. Youcoolyeah?” Speech Debelle delivers even the most humdrum information with singsong musicality and bounce. She’s a natural. “I rap how I speak,” says the 26-year-old hip-hopper, whose debut album, Speech Therapy, won Britain’s coveted Mercury Prize this year, beating out odds-on favorites La Roux and Bat For Lashes. “In my 10 years of rapping, it took me about nine of those to even consider the way I sound. It was never something I thought about. I just rapped.”

Quiet and unassuming, the xx sit in a corner booth at Manhattan’s Tribeca Grand Hotel. Lead singer Romy Croft orders sliders and a Coke. Keyboardist Baria Qureshi orders sliders and a Coke. Bassist Oliver Sim orders sliders and a Coke. Digital percussionist Jamie Smith orders sliders and a Coke. It’s a routine that fits with the band’s aesthetic: simplicity and taste. Those are the key ingredients to the xx’s Pitchfork-lauded, bass-heavy, dreamy R&B sound, which would make the perfect high school slow-dance jam, if it were only slightly less hip.

Jay-Z's protege makes his play

Motor oil. A plastic tarp. Self tanning lotion. These are just a few of the materials artist Aaron Bobrow uses to invest his clean, graphic paintings with deeper meanings. “My work has a lot to do with transportation,” he says to explain the motor oil. “Industrialized society runs on oil. Gasoline, too, but oil is the real lubricant.”

The 'Community' co-stars on comedy

The thespian talks Jonas Brothers, 'Teen Wolf' and sideburns

Lest Twilight fans worry that vampire-chic has lost its momentum, rest assured: with the 2010 release of Let Me In, blood is still the new black. The American remake of Let the Right One In, a Swedish coming-of-age tale about a young boy who befriends a young girl (who is actually an ancient vampire), joins a field already littered with creatures of the night. Taking over for the boy and the bloodsucker are 13-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee and 12-year-old Chloë Moretz. McPhee, already an Australian Film Institute award winner for his role in 2007’s Romulus, My Father, appears next in this winter’s grueling, apocalyptic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, scrounging for food and safety in a decimated landscape with Viggo Mortensen. The Australian, whose real father is also an actor, attends school when he’s home, but readily admits, “I like being different from the other kids.”