Packing up 900 pairs of glasses for delivery via the USPS is no easy task, but anything is possible with a little (or a lot of) help from your friends.
On a recent Thursday night in San Francisco’s Mission District, dozens of people congregated in the Southern Exposure gallery for a “wrapping party.” The event is like “going to an art opening, but you’re given something to do,” says Jonn Herschend, one of the evening’s hosts and a co-founder of the as-yet-unwrapped object in question: the latest issue of The Thing, an experimental periodical “in the form of an object” that goes out to subscribers worldwide. (Read More…)
The city’s unofficial motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” blares from bumper stickers on BMWs and jalopies alike, on T-shirts worn by joggers along Lady Bird Lake and in the windows of independently owned shops and restaurants. It’s an exhortation for a city that clings 
It was a crisp and sunny Saturday in Yountville, a wine-soaked town in the heart of the Napa Valley, and a steady trickle of day-trippers was hopping from tasting room to oak-scented tasting room, spearing Manchego cubes and sipping the latest vintages. 
At first, I tried to resist the seduction. I felt that there was something shameful, whorish even, in tourists lusting after color, pointing their cameras at a retreating pink sari, or a flash of red turbans. Yet over and over again I swiveled toward the colors, camera in hand, as if magnetized. I was in northwest India for ten days, reporting a story for the New York Times about traditional arts in Rajasthan—a region renowned for its riotous visuals, and beset, as throughout India, with crippling poverty. 
ON $250/DAY
Driving Bhutan’s single highway, a serpentine road hacked precariously into the side of a mountain and perpetually under repair, is an exercise in nerve. It averages 20 curves per mile, and requires honking before every one to warn the overloaded trucks and grazing cows that lurk around each bend. 