Longreads

A trip to the Iranian resort island of Kish illuminates the pressures, limits, and strange consequences of economic sanctions. Kevin van Aelst For years, I have been advising my cash-poor friends:…

Amy Winehouse Mark Allan/WireImage This story is from the August 18th, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. Sitting in a popular Miami diner with rain pouring down outside, Amy Winehouse and her new husband,…

State of the Union David Remnick, The New YorkerJodi Kantor’s new book about the Obama marriage, and why the president and first lady have it so much better than most of their predecessors.…

When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist with surprisingly florid diction (Nicolas Cage) and his barren police officer wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a loudmouth furniture magnate's quintuplet and run into trouble with two escaped convicts and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. I didn't get it, really, but I didn't care: It was hilarious and strange, with amusingly quotable dialogue ("I'll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash ya got") and hummable music (the "Ode to Joy" on a banjo, yodeling) throughout. During my high-school years, I caught up with the rest of the Coens' output and considered myself a fan; their best movie to that point, Fargo, came out just before I graduated and was the first I saw in a theater.

Everything from cutting-edge scientific ideas to a new philosophy of learning to art that honors living in the momentMemorial Day weekend has come, which mea

Last week, BC economist Robyn Allan weighed-in on the McGuity-Redford fiasco with a post of the effect of oil extraction on the Canadian dollar, and the knock-on effects of a high dollar on Canadian…