Don’t get too excited. No one’s seriously talking about mermaids being real (well, Animal Planet is). But the two giant creatures that recently washed up on busy California beaches a few days apart may well be the source of all the old sea serpent stories. One was 18 feet long, the other 14 feet, long  ...

I grew up on my dad’s stories of Hindu gods—and on Marvel comics. There were other ingredients to life, obviously, but these are two that I channeled into writing “The Chronicles of Kalki,” the Vishnu installment of my Displaced Hindu Gods trilogy now playing at Mixed Blood Theatre. The trilogy displaces the Hindu trinity of  ...

He’s a poet for people who don’t think they like poetry, the rare poet who’s regularly featured in poetry journals and Esquire. He uses words like most people use a needle-nose pliers, to pry, wrench, twist, and argue their way into and out of things. Alex Lemon is a linguistic badass, and he’s reading tonight  ...

Tibet may be in turmoil, but monastic education—monks in saffron robes and shaved heads studying the ancient, esoteric ways of Tibetan Buddhism—hasn’t changed for 600 years. Until now. A New York Times story this week tells of a group of Tibetan monks engaged in an educational exchange of Eastern scholarship and Western scientific principles at  ...

Andy Sturdevant, the ubiquitous and distinctly hirsute artist, writer, and man about town, is taking on the mapping of alleyways in Minneapolis. His upcoming MAEP exhibition, “Alley Atlas,” is an open-source blend of urban design and personal history in which Minneapolitans are invited to name alleys based on their experiences of them. In anticipation of  ...

When I was in college, I spent years in a very college quandary: What was my true calling, letters or art? On the one hand, letters: I had felt the call to write from the youngest age, literally—I was the editor of the P.S. 94 kindergarten haiku magazine. (The kindergarten haiku editor morphed into the  ...

The discoverers of the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, were recently co-awarded a Nobel Prize (at least, two of the researchers were—more than 3,000 worked on the project, including a University of Minnesota physics professor). The Higgs boson, if particle physics papers are not on your bedside table, is believed to enable  ...

The discoverers of the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, were recently co-awarded a Nobel Prize (at least, two of the researchers were—more than 3,000 worked on the project, including a University of Minnesota physics professor). The Higgs boson, if particle physics papers are not on your bedside table, is believed to enable  ...

I didn’t realize that paintings could be punk rock until I saw the work of Francis Bacon. When I see something like Study for Portrait VI, I get the same sense of menace and terrible beauty that I got when I first heard the Sex Pistols. Bacon’s work is made more menacing and thrilling by  ...

I didn’t realize that paintings could be punk rock until I saw the work of Francis Bacon. When I see something like Study for Portrait VI, I get the same sense of menace and terrible beauty that I got when I first heard the Sex Pistols. Bacon’s work is made more menacing and thrilling by  ...