We don't actually read much of the fiction in the New Yorker--either it's warmed-over leftovers from famous authors or something from an MFA who's just discovered a) poor or b) ethnic peoples exist--but last week we did. Last week, Sherman Alexie shook things up with a profane, funny, poignant outburst that reminded us of how good New Yorker fiction used to be: "Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucus flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, and unmoored me." This fucking guy Alexie. He just gets better and better. more ›

• Just in time for the holidays, Delicious Baby blog--sorry, extreme foodies, it's not what you think--has 10 tips for surviving flight delays while traveling with kids.
• Gay Seattle Blogspot dares to say it: the Kathy Griffin show at the Paramount was not as funny as last year's, and also offers suggestions for a gay Thanksgiving.
• Following on that, Out & Equal Washington invite you to their happy hour on December 11 at Purr; they're accepting gifts for the Lambert House.

Kim is relieved the debate is actually going to happen. She'll be watching with friends tonight before working all weekend. Saturday, she'll take a break for a quiet night out, and then she'll close the weekend off getting funky in the balcony of Jazz Alley with Maceo.
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We sent special Killer Bugs correspondent Roger van Oosten to Town Hall last night to catch Richard "Hot Zone" Preston's talk. Post-decontamination, here is his report. more ›

In the New Yorker's Talk of the Town this week, they mention the IdreamofHillaryIdreamofBarack website, at which people who have dreamed of either candidate are invited to share what went down (and recently, for balance, McCain dreamers are invited to contribute, too). more ›

Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert. more ›

We're not fools -- a lot of you will miss this, purposefully, because you don't care about rail-riding hobo culture. But that is your loss. When he was still under 40, the New Yorker called William T. Vollman "one of the twenty best writers in America under 40." He's been to Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Seattle. more ›

co-horts Leon Wieseltier and Dale Peck--they accuse of writing literary criticism that "was wholly negative. And, it eventually became clear, indiscriminately so." more ›

Sometimes we just want a slice of pizza. Not a pie. Not a square. Not a round. We’re talking a slice – one that you can grab with a hand, fold inward, and then tilt downward to watch the grease drip to the paper plate before you take that precious first bite more ›

Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly. more ›

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long." more ›

True confessions time: We've never set foot in 826 Seattle. We think we might have seen the building once, at night, while driving somewhere else. more ›

The third annual 826 Seattle benefit People Talking and Singing will fill the seats at Town Hall next Thursday. Comedian Patton Oswalt had to cancel, but the event still features host John Roderick of the Long Winters, Dave Eggers, comedians Todd Barry and Eugene Mirman, New Yorker music critic (and current blogosphere gadfly) Sasha Frere-Jones, local songstress Rosie Thomas, and Geologic of the Blue Scholars. more ›

Bumbershoot 2005 hosted the inaugural People Talking and Singing show, where 2,800 festival attendees packed McCaw Hall to see Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Mike Doughty, Sarah Vowell, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the while raising $18K for 826 Seattle, the youth writing center in Greenwood. Last year's event, also at Bumbershoot, was hosted by Daily Show Resident Expert™ John Hodgman and singer Jonathan Coulton. Eggers, Handler, Gibbard, and Vowell were back for more, along with Decemberist Colin Meloy, Smoosh, and Stephin Merritt. All together, the benefit raised another $10K. more ›

Tonight through Saturday, On the Boards is presenting a world premiere from the John Jasperse Company. Jasperse is a New Yorker-recommended choreographer, and that's more than you've done, admit it. more ›

It’s so great, they had to name it twice. Before you start belting out “New York, New York,” think again. We’re in Seattle, and we’re talking about one of New Yorker Anthony Bourdain’s favorite local eateries: Piroshky, Piroshky. more ›

Ballet Imperial: it's tutus and tights and corps-de-ballet clockwork, but Balanchine's choreography is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe just that one scissor-kicky thing we secretly call "the Snoopy Dance," and therefore have trouble taking seriously. Otherwise, if the dancers were wearing skis, it'd be a black diamond run. This one shows up in the All Balanchine program that starts this weekend. more ›

So we've developed this routine of biking over to Cafe Presse on Sunday afternoons to read our New Yorker; there's coffee-and-a-croissant involved, usually a soccer game on, and then maybe an afternoon Stella starts to sound good. On a good day, three hours go by like that and we emerge happily over-caffeinated and edified -- or slightly wobbly and rooting for Manchester United. more ›

The Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker showed up in the mail box yesterday and the Pacific Northwest (ok, Portland, really, but so what) is well represented. Miranda July, of Portland, has two pieces; one a short story called "Roy Spivey" and the other a recollection of summer movies called "Atlanta." It starts: more ›

FACT: On August 24, 1919, film star Harold Lloyd -- while posing for publicity shots in which he was lighting a cigarette from a lit bomb -- blew the thumb and forefinger off his right hand. "Somehow," accounts explain, "a real bomb had gotten mixed in with the props." In 1923, as if to underscore learning nothing from the experience, he released one of the most famous films of all time, Safety Last! (Which you won't see at this month's retrospective of the films of Harold Lloyd because they just showed it a while ago.) more ›

Jonathan Lethem understands what being an unabashed fan feels like, and we are an unabashed, dorky fan of his many books and recent essays. When we heard that he is non-exclusively sharing some of his short stories for $1 to be reused in other works of art (films, songs, etc) and he is giving away the option to his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, and releasing the ancillary rights after five years, we realized he was moving even further into territory very dear to our heart. We chatted with him in advance of his appearance at the Seattle Arts and Lecture series Wednesday night. more ›

That afternoon, [Wolfowitz] took part in a panel on foreign aid with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has an endowment of $30.6 billion; William Easterly, an economist at New York University who is a well-known skeptic of development policy; and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former bank official who is the President of Liberia. The discussion was held in a large auditorium, and every seat was taken. Gates and Easterly quickly got into an argument about the efficacy of aid programs. Easterly pointed out that research had failed to demonstrate any link between aid and economic growth. In the past forty-two years, he said, Africans have received five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars in aid, yet there has been no appreciable improvement in their living standards. more ›

MOVIES: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are attracted to a film program called Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces, and those who are repelled. If you're the former? Tonight's your night. more ›

SPELLING BEES: The Re-bar's adult spelling bee was on Evening Magazine recently so there may be an even stronger turnout than usual. more ›

SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. more ›

A while ago, we were invited to a happy hour at Coco la ti da, and then we didn't review its offerings because we know when we're out of our league. All we'd heard about it was that it was a "dessert lounge," and our ears perked up because we like to sample how different places do chocolate mousse. (It's a quirk.) more ›

LOCAL AUTHOR, LOCAL AUTHOR: Clear Cut Press presents two of its novelists: Matt Briggs' Shoot The Buffalo is about a boy growing up in Snoqualmie during the '70s. Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson, set in a small town in Florida, details the random choices made by the eponymous Ms. Johnson. more ›

As we predicted when we first heard this story about Frosty Hardison--a parent who convinced the Federal Way school board to stop showing An Inconvenient Truth back in December--a whole host of sane, level-headed people wrote into the school board to suggest that Frosty was a bit off his rocker. Sadly, the Federal Way school board still insists that teachers, when covering a "controversial" topic, offer a "credible, legitimate opposing view" about that topic. more ›

God dammit! We're in no way convinced carbon offsets are any kind of a solution to global warming, but the news that a King County court has decided that Seattle City Light can't use ratepayer's money to buy them pisses us off nonetheless. Their argument is that it should be general taxpayer money that saves the Earth, and that ratepayer money is for the operation of the utility. more ›