United States of America
Interested in Interest
It was a sweltering, 117-degree July day in Hinkley, California. The surface of the 13-mile highway east to Barstow had become an asphalt skillet, and the town's lone recreational feature, a children's playscape, stood shining and unused like a monument to the lofty melting point of low-density polyethylene.
Letter of Recommendation Every night I spend a few minutes catching up with my friends. I saw them during the day - maybe one rode along with me on my long commute, or relaxed nearby while I worked from home. But this last check-in closes the evening nicely.
On a clear Wednesday morning in January, Ken Layne arrives at his tiny converted homesteader cabin office of the Desert Oracle in Joshua Tree, California, to find a very fat dead cat outside the front door. Layne doesn't know to whom the cat belongs-well, belonged-or why the cat was left dead on his porch, but there it is.
Stephen Hawking, who died this March at the age of 76, was a physicist from another time. He had more in common with the celebrity scientists of the first half of the 20th century - especially the politically-inclined scientist-intellectuals like Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Enrico Fermi who came out of the Manhattan Project - than he did with any of his contemporaries.
There is no place to start with Otto Weininger other than his death. A recently graduated Viennese philosophy student, Weininger published an expanded version of his thesis under the title Sex and Character to very little fanfare. Four months later, he rented a room in the house where Beethoven died.
The number of visitors to Joshua Tree National Park has doubled in the past four years, an increase that spells trouble for local flora and fauna. But as tourism has increased, so have the numbers of conscious residents and conservation efforts.
One day in 1985, while Jim Henson was wrapping up Labyrinth, a young Swedish filmmaker entered a boardroom to pitch Henson and his straight-laced British producer Duncan Kenworthy on a new movie. The filmmaker wanted Jim Henson Creature Shop to build fantastical-yet-lifelike animals for a movie called Animal Farm.
If you encounter some kind of Highlander scenario and you need to choose one and only one orange comic strip cat to be in your life, it should be Heathcliff. (Hobbes, being a tiger and also a doll, does not count.)
Ever since we imagined the technological sophistication to send ourselves hurtling at escape velocity away from the Earth and toward some unknown pinprick of light in the unending vacuum of open space, obsessive individuals and paranoid governments have spent billions of dollars trying to figure out how to get as far away from our home planet as possible.
In the giant concrete parking structure abutting the Los Angeles Convention Center, nearly two hours before E3 began there on June 12, I held back in my car a little longer to watch the Nintendo Direct livestream where the company announced the details of upcoming releases.