In a Reykjavik café last week, a tour guide named Anne told me it was because she found Icelanders so genuinely positive that she'd moved there from Germany. Her perspective on the country was engaging. When she volunteered six years ago to work there on a farm, she was struck by how welcoming…

Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking through a review of Emma Straub’s debut novel, “Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures,” a book I enjoyed, but also had issues with. A Slate story published Friday, “Against Enthusiasm” by Jacob Silverman, on the supposed suffocating niceness of the online book…

Page-Turner August 8, 2012 I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we…

The Bay Citizen Ellen Ullman in the Montgomery Street building where her new San Francisco novel takes place.Credit...Annie Tritt/The Bay Citizen Before she was an author, Ellen Ullman worked in the late 1970s as a programmer during the formative years of Silicon Valley, writing code to help…

Op-Ed Contributor Credit...Angus Greig San Francisco AS a former software engineer, I laughed when I read what the Securities and Exchange Commission might be considering in response to the debacle of Knight Capital’s runaway computerized stock trades: forcing companies to fully test their computer…

Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things By Peter-Paul Verbeek (University of Chicago Press, 183 pp., $25) JUST WEST OF SEOUL, on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea, a city is rising. Slated for completion by 2015, Songdo has been meticulously planned by engineers…

While the attention of the world is affixed elsewhere on those trying to achieve greatness, it was Sandy Koufax Bobblehead Night at Dodger Stadium, and a good reminder of two men who found perfection here almost 47 years ago. “Three times in his sensational career has Sandy Koufax walked out to the…

Five Reasons Non-Indigenous People Should Boycott ‘Indian’ Iconography in Sports Travis Reitsma I grew up a White kid in a very White part of Southern Ontario. I remember in the fourth grade being seated beside an Indigenous boy named A.J. who grew up on a nearby reserve. A.J. was a quiet kid who…

The Wintermitts When Vancouver's Wintermitts set out on a cross-country tour of small venues last spring with an old suitcase full of merchandise, they sold the usual T-shirts, professionally packaged CDs of their latest studio album, Océans, and this time something new: crafty, silk-screened poster…

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The Art of Fielding was one of the most heavily-hyped novels to come along in a while, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my dad mailed me my own brand-new copy. Dad knew what he was talking about: a baseball story about much more than baseball, Chad Harbach’s long-time-in-the-making novel…

Illustration by Sean Ford. The writer Emma Straub has 9,192 Twitter followers. That might seem like a lot for an author whose first novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, hasn’t even come out yet. But Emma Straub is really good at Twitter. She’s funny and charming and evinces great enthusiasm for…

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter What are we talking about? The new novel by Zadie Smith, a "quietly de

Paste | A.V. Club | Jezebel | Splinter | Wolfgang's Latest News Film TV Music Games Anime Books Aux Newsletter Bluesky Instagram Twitter YouTube Facebook Latest News TV Film Music Games Anime Aux Newsletter Featured Movies Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone somehow made each other Oscar darlings…

Illustration: Kagan McLeod/New York Magazine . What Was That? Part I Four months before Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise, the couple walked into the Mark Taper Forum, in downtown Los Angeles, to see a performance of Clybourne Park. A thirty­something film marketer in the audience, out…

Sometimes, we just ought to accept the fact that people have disagreements when it comes to hot-button social issues. · Saturday, July 28, 2012 · 109 comments While Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has back

Worth reading in full: The Future of Manufacturing Is in America, Not China - By Vivek Wadhwa | Foreign Policy: http://t.co/u78CXLHY

How much is a hipster worth to a city? Is she worth more when she's building an app, or when she's writing a blog? Is a hipster with a walrus mustache and a mean whiffle ball pitch worth more than one who wears a sarong and practices aerial yoga? How many of them can dance on the pull tab of a PBR?…

At Home With Emma Koenig LAUNCHING PAD Emma Koenig with her mother, Bobby Bass. She is typical of her generation: bad jobs, duds for dates and an assist from her parents, whose house she recently moved out of.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times GLEN RIDGE, N.J. AT 24, Emma Koenig has amassed…

Evolution is a nice, big idea. It connotes the glacial pace of an unmeditated act unfolding upon species, concepts, and ecosystems. It certainly doesn’t usually get branded as a feeling. But a couple months ago I felt this thing. Maybe a little like what a mommy feels when her fetus kicks the wall…

Thời gian qua, người hâm mộ bóng đá Việt Nam đã có rất nhiều cách để theo dõi, thưởng thức các trận đấu. Bởi hiện tại, có khá nhiều nền tảng, lựa chọn cho mọi người nhờ sự phát triển của internet. Nhưng trong đó, Xoilac chắc chắn là một cái tên quen thuộc và là một lựa chọn tốt nhất với những dịch…

On December 1, 2010, Max Temkin and seven friends launched a Kickstarter project to print a card game they’d been working on for years. Their goal? $4,000 in two months. “Cards Against Humanity is a free party game for horrible people,” they wrote in the project description— Unlike most of the party…

The Myth of the Libertarian Internet: http://t.co/xOVyZanA

Lesson here, folks “@JeffPassan: Meet the Miami Marlins, the biggest con in sports. Column: http://t.co/Vkqxb9lu”

Last year, the fashion experts over at MSN Travel conjured up a list of The Top Ten Cities with the Worst Style and my baby, Vancouver, BC, landed herself the bronze medal. Seeing my hometown place th

Oh dear. Matthew Inman of the marvelous web-comic, The Oatmeal, seems to have experienced that exquisite twitch all modern atheists are doomed to experience — the I-know-what’s-best-for-you-silly-religious-people-come-heed-me spasm. This particular train of thought requires the thinker ignore the…

Culture Desk July 20, 2012 May I add a few thoughts to what Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik have written about the massacre last night at a screening of “Dark Knight Rises”? In recent years, there have been a number of mass murders—at an Army base, repeatedly at schools, at a family party, in post…

Hand guns are displayed at a firing range July 22, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. Getty Images Editor’s Note: David Frum is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a CNN contributor. He is the author of seven books, including a new novel, “Patriots.” Story highlights David Frum says…

Probability is a funny thing. Once you understand it, you appreciate that it exists almost everywhere. So few things are actually certain. So few things have a zero-percent chance of happening, and so few things have a one-hundred-percent chance of happening. Almost everything is chance, and as long…

AaverageJoe, flickr A little while back, we took a look at commuting in Seattle vs. Portland —and found, perhaps unexpectedly, that Seattle had a heck of a lot more transit commuting than Portland. Bu

When it comes to commuting by transit in the larger cities on North America's northwest coast, neither Portland nor Seattle can hold a candle to greater Vancouver. Taras Grescoe's Excellent Adventure on Public Transit read more Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners CONTEST: Win…