For some, it’s their first turn at bat. Other players have been in the game for some time.

JJ Brennan started his bachelor’s degree when Harry Truman was president and “Hopalong Cassidy” was a popular TV series.

An 85-year-old man is among the UNLV students who will be graduating Saturday.

Art comes out of chaos,” culture critic David L. Ulin — now a fellow at UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute — said at last year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “Culture comes out of chaos.” If so, we’re in for some culture-fat times, as the nation’s new political order appears to be a chaos engine: rewriting social norms, destabilizing old certainties and posing fundamental questions about — some would say challenges to — what it means to be an American.

Since its conception in the 1990s, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues—an episodic play that uses the vagina as a symbol of female empowerment—has played a pivotal role in the feminist movement. It has also long figured into UNLV’s programming for V-Day, a national movement and benefit event aimed at stopping violence against women. So why is this UNLV’s last V-Day featuring the Monologues?

As Hamlet said, “Words, words, words.”

But not just any words.

The first compilation of William Shakespeare’s works came out seven years after his death. The 1623 First Folio, assembled by two of Shakespeare’s friends, includes 36 of the Bard’s plays, including such chart-topping hits as Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest. It was a small press run—researchers believe that only 750 copies of the First Folio were printed, of which fewer than 250 survive today. And thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library and UNLV, one of those very rare compilations is coming to Las Vegas.

It may be based on William Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors.”

But, if he were here to watch “Bomb-itty of Errors,” the Bard might not recognize the zany mistaken-identity romp beneath those beats — and those rhymes.

In its third year Downtown and its second partnering with the revived CineVegas, the Las Vegas Film Festival showcased another strong selection of features and short films, with impressive turnout for most screenings. The program included five locally connected features this year, and although they varied in quality, they all demonstrated the professionalism and creativity of filmmakers in town.

Chris Edwards left UNLV in the early ’90s with a degree in business administration — and the feeling that his future wasn’t in business.

Another Oscar season has arrived, bringing with it another chorus of boos about an Oscar acting nominees roster bereft of racial or cultural diversity.

As legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim once observed, musicals aren't written, they're rewritten.