Cultural Exchanges

François Bon knows about the hidden cemetery just behind the Grande Arche, a minimalist monument to modernity that looms over France's version of Wall Street, or La Défense . The decision to surround the office buildings in one of Europe's largest financial hubs with headstones was later viewed as distasteful, and trees were planted to cover them. Now, some employees says Bon, eat sandwiches while sitting on the tombs. Nearby, Bon also knows where to take an elevator that will leave a person lost in an endless expanse of deserted parking lots eight stories below ground.

Reporting from Jerusalem — The fast lane of the New York hip-hop scene doesn't normally merge with the winding side streets of orthodox Jerusalem, but sometimes life makes exceptions. Shot at 15, Jamal Michael Burrow looked to put gang-banging behind him and poured his anger into music. By the late 1990s, he turned a corner and became the rapper Shyne, the next big thing, protégé and comrade to Sean Combs. The makeover nearly complete, his former life caught up with him. A brawl broke out at Club New York, where he was hanging with Combs and Combs' then girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.

Who better than a pair of Colombian writers whose books have spurred talk of an emerging "literature of conflict" to answer the country's perpetual riddle: Why is Colombia so violent? And will the four-decades-long bloodletting that has exacted tens of thousands of victims ever end? The question was first posed to Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a 38-year-old Bogotá native, who has just published his third novel, "The Sound of Things Falling," a taut yarn about a professor's chance and nearly fatal encounter with a drug trafficker.

Tracey Emin always sets out to provoke — her stock in trade is the outrageous and the obscene. But it wasn't just the array of used tampons, pregnancy tests and expletive appliqué tapestry that shocked audiences at her new exhibition "Love Is What You Want," which just opened at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. Instead of her usual outbursts of profanity and perversion, Emin used her limelight to do something perhaps more shocking — she pledged her support for Britain's Conservative-led government, opining that "The Tories are the only hope for the arts.

Bassem Youssef is barefoot, pacing around the dining room of his apartment in the tony Maadi neighborhood where he has assembled a crack team of twentysomething bloggers and activists. They are hunched over their laptops in Conan O'Brien and "Family Guy" T-shirts, plotting Egypt's comedy revolution. To Youssef, 37, the actual revolution was hilarious. Much of the January uprising that unseated Egypt's longtime president was fueled by online media: social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter , but also clips posted on YouTube — images of Tahrir Square, of protesters and security forces and former President Hosni Mubarak addressing the nation on state television.

For those willing to pay for it, some clinics offer therapy to solve a problem of filial distress. "They get some beautiful men to walk around naked beside you, or make you watch gay porn," says Zhang Beichuan, one of China's leading experts on homosexuality, describing a practice he doesn't advocate. "The man naturally will get an erection. When his erection reaches a certain level, the instrument emits an electrical discharge, which upsets him. They repeat the process until the man doesn't get excited anymore.

Art critic and painter Chen Danqing gave a speech in March excoriating the Culture Ministry for meddling in his affairs. "Don't you think this kind of pathetic, cowardly behavior is just like molesting yourselves?" he asked. A little later, the Communist Party arrested Ai Weiwei, artist, blogger, architect and big-hearted provocateur, the biggest catch in a crackdown that has snared dozens of activists. Now, Chen and others like him are left to reflect on what Ai's removal means for China and for them.

For generations, French presidents have filled a nearly sacred role. They act as an embodiment of their republic's lofty ideals, and they exude such judiciousness and serenity that they often end up seeming oddly otherworldly. And then there's Nicolas Sarkozy. The fast-talking president could go toe-to-toe with Chicago's feisty incoming Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a political street fight — and finagle the United States into a war of choice with Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi. Woody Allen recently remarked to the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that he could imagine casting Sarkozy in a Joe Pesci-like tough-guy role.

— The land of hockey, toques and the apology. Cast your eye a little farther down the list of things Canada has given the world (past zippers, Jolly Jumpers and five-pin bowling but well before Céline Dion) and you come to Canadian television. There was "The Beachcombers," "Due South," "Kids in the Hall" and "Road to Avonlea," but unlike Australia, the U.K. or Quebec, which have thriving industries, English Canada's approach to homegrown programming has been more tortoise than hare.

The general director of the Bolshoi Theatre has confirmed that what's seemed like a never-ending reconstruction of the Bolshoi's historic building is finally coming to an end; he promised that a gala concert in October will cap a tough period in the life of this Russian symbol you can see on the crumpled face of a 100 ruble bill. Anatoly Iksanov's announcement last month, however, came like a drink designed to take away the bitter aftertaste of the theater's most recent scandal, in which several dozen pictures of explicit homosexual sex were displayed on a short-lived website closely resembling the Bolshoi's official one. The impostor site contained the biography of the ballet company's longtime manager and popular character dancer, Gennadi Yanin, who appeared in the pictures.