After the (non-)scandal of (un-)banned Tube posters, the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder are now well and truly on show at the Royal Academy. Painter, print-maker, illustrator, businessman, propagandist, and huge fan of the female nude, this is Cranach's first major exhibition in Britain. And while you're gazing at all the nakedness, remember; this was a mate of Martin Luther, and those erotic female nudes are all about Protestant devotion. Honest. Openings Ahoy!......

Children, children, Londonist wants to play a little game with you: it’s called “How to make you cry in one single snapshot.” The rules are pretty simple: you come equipped with your best smiles for the next school piccie and we’ll wipe them off your face instantly: black kids over there please ... yes, you ... Oh and you look a little dark of skin – over there as well please. Still smiling? Alright, Jewish......

Fresh this Week: Two hundred years ago, in 1807, the British turned their backs on the Atlantic slave trade, though for 150 years they had grown fat on its proceeds. Why did they change their minds about it? And what significance should we attach to this, two centuries later? James Walvin, until recently Professor of History at the University of York and winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for Black and White......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

We found it hard to imagine how last year's Big Brother could have been topped; OK, Science or Eugene should have won, but it provided reliable entertainment and too many coffee-machine moments to mention. This year's hasn't quite reached those highs, but we feel it's still in the process of bedding in - like some evil plant, a mandrake, maybe - and is just coiling itself up and building pressure before the big explosion,......

Nothing quite says "tragic beauty" like a spot of aggregate, and no colour is quite so regal as "greygreen". Yes folks, the Princess Diana Memorial Storm Sewer is in the headlines again. You may remember the fountain; it's been "troubled", as sub-editors say when asked to euphemise around the word "a relentless disaster". It was criticised from the start by royalists and polo-necked Clerkenwell types alike for being, basically, a circular ditch. However, it......

What tale could be darker than that of Jack the Ripper, the maniac who murdered five women in London in 1888? The darkened streets of Whitechapel. The flashing knife. The dismemberment. The taunting letters. The sinister hints of a masonic conspiracy with Royal connections. The fact that the killer's identity remains a mystery. So, then, who should play Inspector Abberline, the leader of the doomed investigation into the killings, for the TV adaptation of......