What came first: the Mel Brooks movie or the cliché? The classic Hollywood Sci-Fi spaceship always gets gratuitous screentime from every camera angle. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood spaceship appears in a continuous one minute and 40 second scene detailing its ridiculous length.

For Mel Brooks the spoofing is in the details. The classic Hollywood Horror film is always black-and-white and includes scene transitions like iris outs, wipes and fades to black. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood Horror is no different. He even tracks down the original equipment from the mad doctor’s lab first used in the 1931 Frankenstein film.

Mel Brooks never met a stereotype he couldn’t upend. The classic Hollywood cowboy is always white. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood cowboy is black. And his Indian chief speaks Yiddish.

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner in conversation with director and writer Judd Apatow, marking the day on which the 2000 Year Old Man joins Twitter.

Take a ride on the Philip Roth Tour Bus and see the sights of Roth's Newark, New Jersey -- his hometown and setting of several of his books, like Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and I Married a Communist.

Somehow, someway, Sister Rosetta Tharpe -- "The Godmother of Rock and Roll" -- is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "Like," "Share" and/or download the poster in this post to start the campaign to put Sister Rosetta in the Hall of Fame.

CHICAGO POEMS, published by Carl Sandburg in 1916, is an ode to a city. It's a clear eyed and unapologetic love letter: where you tell your true-love you love them not in spite of their imperfections but because of them. Sandburg starts Chicago Poems with "Chicago." Read it here and see its opening stanza visualized in a series of poster art.

In Carrie and Me, Carol Burnett shares her personal diary entries and correspondence revealing her anguish as a mother of a troubled teenager, the epiphanies that helped her help her family, and the grief and then the hope she felt after her daughter’s death. Through Burnett’s inimitable voice, we get a portrait of an unforgettable young woman that will bring hope to anyone struggling with raising or losing a child.

Lane Cake comes up several times in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Miss Maudie Atkinson -- the Finches’ neighbor -- is known all over the fictitious town of Maycomb for her famous Lane Cakes. The secret to Miss Maudie’s recipe seems to be the bourbon, probably more than the 1 to 3 cups that Mrs. Lane suggests in her recipe. Just ask Scout Finch: “Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.”