On May Day 1947, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale leapt from the observation platform of the Empire State Building and plummeted down 86 floors to land gracefully on a United Nations limousine. Her body looked serene and restful, although the roof of the car had caved in and the windows had shattered. Four minutes afterward, photography student Robert Wiles snapped a photo of McHale before police arrived. →

Bespectacled and pretty, Laura Barrett looks like the girl who used to bury herself in fantasy and sci fi books, now grown up as a woman. Her signature instrument is the kalimba, the African thumb-piano, and she regularly uses theremins, vibraphones, strings and woodwinds in her compositions. The music sounds petite, but there’s an outsized sense of imagination in each song. →

It was the late ‘80s and there I was, a quirky, bi-racial kid (half Mexican and European Jewish), living in a predominantly Latino community in the inner-city of Los Angeles. If I was not hiding in the containment of my own bedroom, reading whatever book I could get my tiny hands on, I was probably dancing to the tunes of pop-icon Madonna, the disturbingly cool new wave sensation, The Cure or bobbing my head, thinking I was hard to N.W.A. →