Imagine for a moment that East and West are hypothetical strangers meeting for the first time. Invariably, dialogue (once they got over the language barrier) delves into culture, food and customs.
The open-minded duo quickly bond then, like Romulus and Remus, decide to form a great city. But unlike the tempestuous brothers – whose Rome flourished [...]

On entering hacker space Freeside Atlanta a female voice coos, “welcome.” The voice is triggered by a mostly homemade RFID key card security system, which automatically updates a Twitter feed tracking who is in the space. In addition to some pre-fab components, their security system employs an old boom box and a desk phone. It’s [...]

The Spaniards, his friends, made omelets for them the night she left.  They didn’t know that she would leave that night and she didn’t know it either but all week had felt uneasy and uncertain and now she was in Madrid with him, Pablo, and his friends were making Spanish omelets [...]

He polishes off what’s left of the whiskey on ice and slams the tumbler down hard on the kitchen counter. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” blares from the speakers.
He places his hands face down on the counter to lean and stare at the floor. When he looks up, he catches a glimpse of the [...]

On Saturday we awake in Augusta, 320km south of Perth and the last town before the cape where the winds have long risen up to sink ships. I hug the 14km coastline from Augusta to the southwestern tip of the continent, but it’s the middle of the day and the car park is overflowing; we’re [...]

“I started drinking again.” Willard interrupted me. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He hadn’t said four words since we sat down to eat and now he pops out with this?
“When?” I asked. It seemed like an appropriate question.
“Tuesday,” he answered.
I smelled the heat of his breath and sighed.
Who starts back drinking on [...]

Years before he wrote his first book, Thomas Wolfe foretold of his discovery of something that existed in every man and realized by few. “I don’t know yet what I am capable of doing,” he wrote. “But, by God, I have genius — I know it too well to blush behind it.”
Wolfe spent his childhood [...]

One of my favorite things about attending SXSW is observing predominant fashion trends. It seems like every year there’s something else ridiculous that everyone is wearing. As a man who is basically clueless about fashion, I think I am particularly poorly qualified to discuss these trends, which makes it all the more awesome that I [...]

Dear Aunt Judy:
I’m writing to you from a café around the corner from my apartment. There’s free wireless here. In these trying economic times, I no longer find it sensible to pay some greedy company for the right to surf the Internet at home. Also, my neighbor blocked his wireless. So I come here on [...]

The ceremony started with the bath but ended with her on the rug, the same candles as just a minute before, but now cross legged, still just as naked. She said the same prayer for him as she had the night before, and the night before that. Always his name in repetition, a singsong of [...]

[Editor's note: Sure, we know this is a story about a man and his sexual encounter with a toaster. Yep, it's probably not safe for work. And yes, we get that a lot of you might find it in poor taste. We're still running it. We love it.]
Levon awoke with a start to a bizarre [...]