Food Reviews & Stories The RingSide Fish House, perched on the mezzanine of the theater district’s Fox Tower, is the first addition to Portland’s staid RingSide steak empire in three decades.   More

Books One of the signal pleasures of a nostalgic soap opera like AMC’s Mad Men-—or, more recently, ABC’s Pan Am—is the consistent appeal of discovering that our predecessors’ morality is roundly   More

News First things first: I did not attend the Occupy Portland protest on purpose; I was in Old Town for my own reasons.   More

Books Irish writer Sebastian Barry—twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, called by Salon “the best prose writer in the English language”—is one of the most ambitious writers today. His new b   More

Food Reviews & Stories Some of my fondest memories from my time in Chicago are of the Spartan, hole-in-the-wall, train-car Polish cafes in the northwest part of the city. These were Polish community gathering places cente   More

Arts & Books It is a common trope that reading is really the only art that requires skill from its audience; this is one of the reasons that the audience for serious literature will always be limited, whatever the countless perky entreaties of high school librarians. But in his 24-hour monologue, All the Hours of the Day, Mike Daisey demanded something even rarer than skill or education: he asked of his audience fortitude, character, sheer inhuman will. That or a large supply of trucker speed.
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Arts & Books It is a wonderful thing to be able to revisit a strong performance piece almost a year later, and to notice entirely different things in it. During my first viewing of Teeth’s moving dance piece Home Mad...   More

Arts & Books So it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re all gathered round to watch cars crash behind the high school. These same three cars crashed twice Saturday, and they will do it again in a few hours. I’m not sure what I had expected, exactly, but I know I had expected something else; I had been told that cars would be made to crash in slow motion, and had wanted perhaps a giant game of popcor...   More

Books Let’s get the obligatory journalism out of the way quickly: Michael Dickman’s biography is interesting. He and his twin brother, Matthew, are both terribly renowned young poets (if poets are ev   More

Books In Portland-born animator Bill Plympton’s films, faces might turn themselves inside out, explode, or puddle into primordial goo; they come back blandly whole, the very soul of bureaucracy. Featur   More