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

Culture Whatever Ellis Island’s pleasant fictions about the poor, meek or hungry, Portland’s Old Town has always welcomed them in earnest. It has been a century-long home to the transient or boozy, whe   More

Books It is a common thing, beneath the deafening noise of America’s Lohans and Kardashians, to hear tell that our culture—as a result of reality television, willful illiteracy, celebrity worship, the   More

Movie Reviews & Stories There are things you don’t do on film, if you want to keep your viewer’s sympathy. You don’t shoot toddlers, for one—especially not in front of their mom. You don’t burn innocents alive. Y   More

Books Perhaps no American writer of the past 25 years has inspired more devotion, hope and resentment than David Foster Wallace. When his dense-prosed, block-paragraphed doorstopper, Infinite Jest, dropp   More

Food Reviews & Stories Secret Kebab, as the name might suggest, is a kebab-smuggling operation, steered by the unseen hand of a shadowy, mustachioed figure known as Alparslan the Turk, who is also suspected of being a li   More

Books It is natural to assume that the topography of a city is fundamentally constant—that some half-distant ancestors found a promising patch of earth and proceeded to sow the seeds for what would ripen, as if inevitably, into the place we know well. But cities are things of tumult   More