As I was watching the mid-June press screening of Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko, I could almost hear the lips of the conservative bloggers and talk show hosts beginning to smack as the smell of fresh meat wafted over the media landscape. Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine won the Academy Award for best documentary, won’t … Read more
This summer, those trapped in the concrete jungle seek relief by wearing nature on their T-shirts. Hot styles include a silhouetted flock of birds hovering over an oak tree, and baroque, often airbrushed, images of dense forests and meadow grasses. As one who rode the crest of this trend, how does botanist-cum-T-shirt designer Sarah Nassif … Read more
Chiropractors were the first to sound the alarm. Now, some women have answered by tossing aside their gargantuan handbags in favor of miniature versions. Clutches seem to be the most popular of these pint-sized purses; after all, they represent the natural progression from big to small, as their shapeless, hobo-esque forms echo that of the … Read more
Any good businessperson knows that if you want to cultivate a certain type of clientele, you meet with them on their own turf. Jodi Livon, a psychic medium who has counseled movers and shakers in the corporate world for the past twenty-five years, offices not in some shabby storefront, but at The Atria, a plush … Read more
[Aquarium bubbling] … [chairs squeaking] … [computer keys clicking] … These sounds are indications of productivity at CaptionMax, Inc., the Midwest’s only closed-captioning company. Long before CaptionMax moved into their capacious digs in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, founder and president Max Duckler earned his first entrepreneurial dollar (in 1993), just months after installing captioning software onto … Read more
When I was at home, I was in a better place. —Shakespeare, As You Like It “I’m somewhere in a godforsaken rainforest on the north coast of West Papua, Indonesia, and I’m ready to get the hell out of here.” So begins Michael Behar’s “The Selling of the Last Savage,” which originally appeared in Outside … Read more
Like the ice sheets of Greenland, the American newspaper industry appears to be collapsing faster than the worst pessimists thought possible. Recently the Wall Street Journal ran a story in which Avista Capital Partners, the investment firm that has owned the Star Tribune since early March, conceded that its half-billion-dollar Minnesota toy is producing cash … Read more
There’s no love lost between me and the cat that lives in our house. She’s not really my cat; I bought her for one of the kids a while back. There had been a specific Christmas wish for a white kitten with a red ribbon round its neck. I had worked a lot of overtime … Read more
Banks are about delayed gratification: today’s pleasure denied for a better tomorrow. And hotel restaurants often aren’t about gratification at all: You are a stranger in a strange town, you’re tired, you’re hungry and you’re on an expense account, so why not just eat here? But Bank, the upscale dining room in the new Westin … Read more
It’s hard to find a decent Shiraz in Shiraz these days, but that doesn’t mean that the Iranians have stopped drinking. (A popular joke: “Under the Shah, we drank in public and prayed in private; now it’s the other way around.”) But you can find some very drinkable Shirazes and first-rate Persian cuisine in stylish … Read more