1. The 19 new films contending for the Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival have been announced, and they include Pedro Almodóvar’s La Piel Que Habito, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. [via ArtsBeat]

2. Bruce Campbell has confirmed that the long-rumored Evil Dead reboot will happen — he’s not just sure when. “Who can say -– we’re all working on other jobs right now. We’re not trying to dodge anybody’s questions, there just isn’t that much to talk about. The remake’s gonna kick ass –- you have my word.” [via Paste Mag]

3. It’s a miracle: A mango jelly bean was found with Kate Middleton’s face on it in Britain. Says the enterprising chap who found it: “Given that the royal wedding is only a few weeks away, we hope to make a few pounds out of it by selling it on the internet to a collector.” [via Gawker]

4. How exactly are book signings supposed to work in the age of the eBook? The New York Times offers up a few ideas, including having an author sign your iPad, which just sounds nuts to us.

5. William Shatner has announced the tracklist for his space-inspired covers album, Searching For Major Tom, and it includes songs by U2, Frank Sinatra, Queen, and Pink Floyd. [via HuffPo]

Bonus link: Watch Roger Ebert’s TED Talk About Losing His Voice

It was announced yesterday that J R, an anonymous, 27-year-old street artist from Paris, had been awarded TED’s $100,000 annual prize — which in the past has gone to more familiar names, like Jamie Oliver, Bono, and Bill Clinton. “If there’s one thing I’ve always taken care of with my work, it’s that it’s never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it’s about — no ‘Coca-Cola presents,’” he told the New York Times. “I think the TED people knew that that was one of my main concerns, and I feel pretty sure that we can come up with a project that works that way.” Check out one of his signature large-scale portraits above, and let us know what you think. [Image via Flickr]

It seems like every day someone is sending us a new TED talk. We are big fans of the forward-thinking smart-people conference, but there’s just no way we can watch everything posted on the site. That said, there’s no way we would miss “David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve,” a speech from this year’s event that just appeared on the site. Once we checked out that show stopper (seriously, watch it now), we couldn’t help scanning the TED archives to find the best arts and culture-related talks. Our ten favorites, spanning the realms of art, design, literature, music, and TV, are after the jump.

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This past week, a 1950s video of Vladimir Nabokov sipping tea, discussing Lolita with Lionel Trilling, and just generally being his charmingly elitist self made the rounds. It reminded us that author videos don’t have to resemble the BookTV cliche of someone just droning on and on. It also got us thinking: What else is out there today? After the jump, we collect our five favorite sites for author videos.

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