Judith Lewis

Art by Paine ProffittSOMETIME IN THE LATE 1960s, IN THE BLUE-COLLAR suburb of the Midwestern city where I grew up, there circulated a photograph that was said to be of Jesus Christ. Crumpled and dirty by the time I got my hands on it, the picture showed the shadowy suggestion......

Photo by Kaos"LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I WAS A BUTTERFLY," wrote Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu most famously. "So how do I know now whether I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man?" A nice thought, this, useful for an existential party......

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I WROTE AN ARTICLE about my single frustration with the Linux operating system: To wit, it cannot run Microsoft Word, or any word-processing program comparable to it. The day after the article ran, my e-mail inbox flooded with comments from more readers than any story about......

Photo by Erin FiedlerIN THE WAKE OF ANY DISASTER, BOTH MEDIA and public apply themselves to understanding why it happened: why the plane crashed, why the earth shook, and why, most recently, two high school students murdered 12 of their classmates and one of their teachers before killing themselves. Then,......

THE HORRIFIC EVENTS IN LITTLETON, COLORADO, have been, by now, ascribed to a number of influences: The Basketball Diaries, Marilyn Manson, a comic book called The Trenchcoat Brigade, Goth anomie, a band called KMFDM. While all these things may or may not have figured into the style of the crime,......

MOST DAYS, JEFF SOFTLEY IS HAPPY TO DIRECT YOU TO HIS WEB SITE, https://www.earthdayenergyfast.org, where he's amassed googols of data on the wastefulness of American consumers (to wit: 7 percent of our energy resources go to home temperature control -- more than most countries use for everything). But on Earth......

MAYBE IT'S THAT TAX-ANXIETY TIME OF YEAR, OR A RESPONSE TO AT&T'S RATE INCREASE announced last week. More likely it's a misunderstanding of a February FCC ruling that classifies dial-up access to the Internet as an interstate call for purposes of "reciprocal compensation" between competing phone companies (local companies pay......

Art by Mike LeeWHEN MATT WELSH INTRODUCES A Microsoft-dependent computer user to a Linux box, he can't start by explaining that Linux is different from Windows. He has to explain that Linux is not Windows. Otherwise, "people will say, 'Oh, well, this is nice -- what version of Windows do......