Pictures

Arts and cultural organizations have a multibillion-dollar impact on the Philadelphia region's economy, and are among the nation's most productive in creation of jobs and stirring up economic activity. Only those in the Washington area generate more per-capita expenditures, and in terms of jobs, no region comes close to Southeastern Pennsylvania. Cultural activity generates nearly $170 million in state and local taxes annually and supports 44,000 jobs within the city and its four suburban Pennsylvania counties, according to a study set for release Monday by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Once DNA evidence made clear that all humanity came from Africa, researchers have been scouring that vast continent in search of a fuller story of our origins. Where in Africa was the cradle of humanity? And how are modern people related to the common ancestor that all humanity shares? Two groups have recently added surprising new details to the picture by using DNA collected from modern hunter-gatherers - the Pygmies of Cameroon, the Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, and the Khoe-San of southern Africa.

Ever notice how nearly everything we read about African American males isn't about how they're portrayed as people but what they represent as data? Almost always cited as the highest dropout, unemployment, homicide, incarceration, baby-daddy, insert-negative-stereotype-here statistic. Hardly ever depicted as someone who feels or loves, who is respected as a son, pupil, spouse, or simply a kid with a dream. Well, this week, newly minted authors Amir Isley, Cameron Pollard, Hasan Saunders-Prioleau, Tyhee Robinson, Vaughn Hines, Christian Hankerson, Isaiah Lee and Kyheim Little - middle schoolers at Gesu School in North Philly - blew those bleak images out of the water with the words of their new book, Listen to Our Voices , produced with longtime educator Christine S. Beck, the recently retired CEO and president at Gesu.

CHARLOTTE - Enveloped by red, white, and blue, thousands of black and brown faces will stand out this week at the Democratic National Convention, mirroring an increasingly diverse America and contrasting with scenes from the Republican convention that just ended. Led by a president with a black father and a white mother, Democrats will tout diversity and sell themselves as inclusionary, sensitive to the most marginalized, and hip to the nation's changing demographics. Of their delegates, one study found, 26 percent are black.

IN THIS AGE of 3-D blockbusters, it's easy to forget that movies are the direct descendants of photos. "The Long Now," an exhibit starting Friday in the Goldie Paley Gallery at the Moore College of Art & Design, aims to illuminate that history. The gallery has been transformed into a traditional theater to provide the audience with an authentic cinema experience. The first piece is Mark Lewis' "North Circular" (2000). The four-minute film is so static at times it's hard to distinguish it from a photo.

Joshua Tucker has reserved his place in the long history of dumb criminals. Had he not pawned a laptop computer he stole from a man he and three friends beat to death in 2011, police would never have found the pictures Tucker put of himself and the friends on the computer and on Facebook. But as sinister as he was, after being arrested, Tucker, 20, of Sydney Street near Woolston Avenue in Cedarbrook, did the right thing. He not only admitted taking part in the Feb. 12, 2011 robbery and fatal beating of laptop owner Huan Phu Dam, 56, but he also confessed to taking part in another murder a month earlier.

VANESSA BRYANT loves to watch her husband Kobe score - as long as it's on the basketball court. TMZ, citing a source, reported than Vanessa was "furious" after seeing photos of her shirtless hubby with two women in a Barcelona nightclub last week. The source told TMZ that the photo was taken after someone had spilled a drink on Kobe. The U.S. star reportedly removed it and sent someone to get him a clean, dry one. Yet another photo showed Kobe chatting with two women at a table.

Over her life, June Sams has been told she has schizophrenia and four mental health disorders: bipolar, post-traumatic stress, major depressive, and personality. The 60-year-old Chester woman's current diagnoses - she thinks these fit - are major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders plus PTSD due to childhood trauma. A doctor told Elisa-Beth Gardner, 51, of Swarthmore, that she had borderline personality disorder (BPD) in 1996. Three months later, she was told she had bipolar disorder.

From the pastoral serenity of "Visions of Arcadia" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we turn this week to its antithesis, the paintings, drawings, and photographs by Eric Fischl at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.   As with the Arcadians, nudes and semi-nudes predominate in Fischl's work, but there the resemblance ends. Instead of idyllic harmony, Fischl gives us tension, ambiguity, mild — and sometimes explicit — eroticism and the unsettling sense of not being able to figure out what's going on. Fischl has been making such visual provocations since the 1980s, when he became known for suggesting on canvas that suburbia was something less than a white-bread paradise.