How Tucson’s wounds belong to a larger American story.

A secular Jew recalls a childhood Christmas with his estranged Catholic mother, and finds himself oddly suffused with the Christmas spirit.

Mark Boyle, a man who lived a year without money, says money is a bit like love. We spend out entire lives chasing it, yet few of us understand what it actually is.

If I gave you $1tn dollars right now would you accept it?

Not a chance. Except maybe to use it to light my rocket stove with, or to redesign our social and environmental infrastructure in a way in which money was no longer needed or relevant. Almost certainly the latter.

Why not just earn money and give it organizations to help those in poverty?

That would be almost as ridiculous as a major oil company polluting the oceans and then throwing some of the profits to an environmental agency to attempt to clean it up. My perspective is that it is best not to create problems in the first place.

We maintain class structure within national boundaries, and we maintain it between nations. Without a poor, there can be no rich. If the poor were also rich –- as many of the rich pay lip-service to achieving –- the inflationary effect would be such that the rich would no longer be rich. And if all were financially well-off and educated, who the hell would wake up on a Monday morning and spend forty hours in a tinned bean factory? Who’d supply our supermarkets with one dollar pineapples in winter? You? Me?

A conversation with Ron Currie, Jr., whose acclaimed novel, Everything Matters!, is about to drop in paperback.

On the shotgun blast heard around the world, and the difficult subject it raises.

Smug without being smug, pretentious without being pretentious, Janeane Garofalo is everything she isn’t more than anything she is. These seeming paradoxes reveal the depth of the Los Angeles celebrity scene, where ideas are worn heavier than the makeup Janeane Garofalo doesn’t wear. Free of animal testing, approved by the Humane Society, THIS is Janeane Garofalo.

When your father’s errands consist of things like buying a piece of sheet-metal that he can bend into a box for the prototype of the sonic ant-deterrent he recently invented, you know your family is weird.