Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 80th birthday. Ursula K. Le Guin reading from "Always Coming Home" at Potlatch 18, streamed into Second Life I read The Dispossessed for the first time during my junior year of college, and its lesson, in a friend’s...

I’ve recently learned that my nickname, which my friend Karen bestowed on me back in 1989, is a term of art in fan fiction. To ‘whump’ a character is to write a fic where awful things happen to him, often at the hands of other characters from the...

Two recent, related posts about surcharges faced by the working poor. Andrew Leonard, writing at Salon, discusses debit cards. Which, outside of California, can expire if not used. Wal-Mart plans to stop cutting checks for employees who don’t have...