Counterfeit Smokes
“On first approach, Yunxiao seems like any other Chinese backwater caught in an uneasy industrial transition. Faded advertisements line the downtown streets, where motorcyclists wearing bamboo-frond hats vie for paying…
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16056 posts
Everything that can’t be categorized but is still wonderful!
Morning Coffee
It sure is hot these days. Wired on the personhood of whales. A famous person has died. DJs buy own music using stolen cards. The coolest bridge in the entire…
Evening Cocktail
A word of explanation: because the Morning starts with Coffee, the Evening starts with a Cocktail, served promptly at half-past six by your attentive host. You can imagine the cocktail…
Welcome to the Night Shift
I’m an insomniac, and many times these past few months I’ve checked this site at three or four in the morning, and found that nothing had appeared since the previous…
When Pigs Fly
The e-ticket I held in my hand entitled me to board two airplanes, which I did. I flew all the way from Cairo International Airport to the glitzy city of…
Morning Coffee
Investigative linguist discovers first known use of “Ms.” in print. (via @randomdeanna) Kush, sleep support for your breasts. An interview with Nic Brown, author of Floodmakers. Disappearing on sex weekends,…
Travel As A Political Act
Rick Steves’s recent book, Travel As A Political Act tells us how we can travel more thoughtfully. “Growing up in the U.S., I was told over and over how smart,…
In Case You Missed. . .
Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which,…
Junot Diaz’s Favorite New Yorker
At Red Hill Books we keep having to order more Junot Diaz books. It’s really extraordinary. They keep flying off the shelves on a daily basis.
Discovering Georges Simenon
Maybe because I’m one-quarter Belgian, or so my parents claim, I tend to go out of my way to discover famous Belgians. I’m half-kidding about that but I do admit…
The Daily Grind Of Writing
I laughed out loud, like a lot of writers probably did this week, when I read J. Robert Lennon’s confession in the L.A. Times, The Truth About Writers. The truth,…
Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Billy Collins says we need better poets in the US: “There’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t…