My dad’s 30-year coming out

I must’ve been eight or nine the one time my dad took me along to meet Bart. This was somewhere near Tompkins Square Park. What I recalled was a shaggy shock of blue hair, and feelings of both elation and terror: On the one hand thrilled to be old enough to be taken along one night to the city to meet a guy with blue hair, and on the other frightened of the jagged dark in the Alphabet City of ...

Vietnam's coal art at risk due to lack of funding

Quang Ninh (Viet Nam News/ANN) - Nguyen Tuan Quyet's family has run a special profession for three generations: making sculptures from black coal, one of the most exploited minerals in northern Quang Ninh Province.

Pioneer Potluck: About Mothers

Whether you called your Mom, Mother, Mama, Mommy, I am sure she was very special.

Marie Kolasinski dies at 90; Christian activist ran O.C. crafts business

Dubbed 'Che Kolasinski' for her militant anti-government stands, she was the driving force behind Costa Mesa's Piecemakers Country Store. After being jailed in a dispute with Orange County health inspectors, she began ministering to inmates across California. Marie Kolasinski, a devoutly anti-government Orange County grandmother who was sent to jail at 85 after clashing with health inspectors at ...

“The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, "The problem with this story is that it could damage your health": Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet "The Aleppo Codex," Matti ...

Blood, gore, tourism: The ax murderer who saved a small town

This is a story of murder and tourism and ghosts. Of civic failure and the illusion of certainty. It’s a Midwestern story that begins in 1912, before the state of Iowa became a patchwork of vanishing villages, before Interstate 80 and the World’s Largest Truck Stop. It is the year the John Deere company begins building tractors and Arizona enters the Union and a surprising number of Republicans ...