“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...

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  ...