Books From what sounds like static, astronomers can discern an image of the entire universe. Explaining how they pull off this trick is the job of writers like Caleb Scharf, director of astrobiology a   More

Books Stumptown, Kumoricon, Wonder Northwest, OryCon-—does Portland really need another geek convention?  Ron Brister sure thinks so, and he says he’s got the numbers to prove it. The first Ros   More

Books I spent six months traveling the West Coast interviewing coffee roasters for my new book, Left Coast Roast (Timber Press, 296 pages, $16.95). I learned some interesting things. Among them: Stumpto   More

Books Dangerous things happen when bloggers get book deals. Yes, there are remarkably talented writers out there offering socially relevant content in blog form. But the blogosphere is a different sort    More

Books Political cartoons are drawn in stark black-and-white, snapshots that leave little room for nuance. As a political cartoonist, Tim Kreider was limited by the speech bubbles, but his collection of    More

Books For melodramatic adolescents, every little thing that goes wrong feels like the end of the world. For Julia, the tween protagonist of The Age of Miracles, this actually is the case. The debut no   More

Books As its provocative title suggests, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Scientific American, 320 pages, $16) is a book unafraid of topics most of us don’t typically have the balls to bring up. It   More

Books In 1962, 20th Century Fox made a movie that almost bankrupted the studio and changed Hollywood forever. The epic Cleopatra was shot on location in Italy and Egypt at a cost of more than $40 mill   More

Books In How Should a Person Be? (Henry Holt, 306 pages, $16.50), the narrator, Sheila, not yet 30 and fresh from a failed marriage, struggles to write a play about women as she drifts lethargically a   More

Books There are a lot of books about mountaineering disasters, but few center on people with stories like Chhiring Sherpa’s. Buried in the Sky (W.W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, $26.95) is Peter Zuc   More