As we alerted you the other day, author Steven Johnson was in town this week for a flurry of book talks; we caught up with him at Vivace--he didn't imbibe, he was already sufficiently caffeinated he said, and in fact we got 45 minutes of talk into our half-hour interview slot--and talked with him a little about his new book, The Invention of Air, but also about the life of Steven Johnson, author. Here's some of that--we'll post more later as we type it up. more ›

The oddest thing about watching last night's Iowa caucus coverage along with the Sonics game is that we had one TV tuned to TNT, and one TV tuned to CNN--and Chuck Norris was on the latter one. more ›

If kaboom-style fireworks aren't the bang you're looking for, stop in at ACT for the theatrical fireworks of David Hare's Stuff Happens, reviewed here. It's the play about Iraq and the rockets' red glare, the difference between the spark of liberty and the blinding torch of neocon ideology. (The title refers to Donald Rumsfeld's disingenuous retort to questions about U.S. forces' disregard of post-"liberation" lawlessness.) By all accounts, it's a thought-provoking (almost 3-hour) imagining of what it was like being "in the room" as the decisions were being made, and confronts us with the outcome of those decisions, ready or not. more ›