There’s a story behind every old band T-shirt. What’s yours?

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Can’t drink your coffee fast enough? Now there’s an inhaler to administer caffeine.

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A forgotten pre-pop masterpiece: Andy Warhol illustrates “The Little Red Hen.” 

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“Why,” asks Slate, “are our cars painted such boring colors?”

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The perils of painting your toenails with your 3-year-old son.

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Never stop rewriting! So says Maxine Hong Kingston, who gave a reading from her new memoir covered in post-its annotating changes for the paperback edition.

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New Republican presidential campaign strategy: Trash talk even the good stuff that happened on your watch. Like this: “Romney attacks green jobs, ignoring the 64,000 created in his state.”

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Lilith remembers the Jewish women who swam their way to independence and freedom during Hitler’s reign.

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Has 2011 been the best-ever year for freedom of expression?

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The Art of the Sentence: Douglas Bauer breaks down Willa Cather’s “He was an ugly fellow, Ivy Peters, and he liked being ugly” over at Tin House.

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Two chefs, two cooking styles, and dinners that threatened to ruin a family.

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The president's secret NYC train station.

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Athletes and singers have coaches, but teachers and surgeons don’t. Should they? Atul Gawande investigates.

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What passes for jaw-dropping beauty these days? We’d say you need not look further than Iceland’s midnight sun.

Image by bucklava, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Although not as famous as Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, photographer Peter Sekaer may be the most relevant of the three today.

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How old is your nation’s literature? Iceland’s sagas date back to the 12th century.

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Do you love your body? If the answer is no, it’s time that you do.

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Porn plays a role in the rise of women seeking labiaplasty.

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Trying to convince your boss to give you a raise? You’ll be more effective if you pitch your case with neuroscientific language.

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Here’s a little bit of celebrity schadenfreude: Brad Pitt being hit by 200 cars.

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A minimal, secular nativity scene doubles as “an experiment to see if the characters are still recognizable even after they have been reduced to only their color and composition.” Seriously. Baby Jesus is a white block.

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Photoblog In Focus collected the best images from around the world during the global “Day of Rage,” a series of protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

Up for debate: A magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work.

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What would a $1 trillion budget cut look like? Leave the explanation to fiscal gladiator Ron Paul.

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A missive from the aftermath of the digital Cowpocalypse.

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What’s the cost of commuting to work every day by automobile? For you and your spouse, a paltry $125,000.

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Finally, a website that lets you know when, exactly, Mercury is in retrograde.

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Who says poetry doesn’t pay? A Canadian poet dedicates his poems to liquor companies and bars in a kind of literary product placement and is compensated with booze.

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100 Abandoned Houses photo project. Beautiful and haunting.

Image of trailers for defense workers at Vultee Aircraft Plant, Nashville, Tennessee, by Peter Sekaer.  

If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the mission of Utne Reader: To promote the best of the alternative and independent press. Well, to that end, there are a couple of new magazines out there that have recently arrived in both our physical inbox and our digital one. They are both worthy of your attention, and we’ll be excited to showcase their work in the future.

The first comes to us from Los Angeles. It’s called Slake and it was started by former L.A. Weekly editors Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa. They are three issues in, and flipping through the third issue—“War and Peace”—is quite the experience. The content is sprawling: from a black-and-white photo essay of a muay thai instructor (to “find the calm interiors that go with [muay thai fighters] warlike exteriors”) to poetry and fiction to long-form journalism to a graphic story. The editors want to create “a new template for the next generation of print publications—collectible, not disposable; destined for the bedside table instead of the recycling bin.” With their first three issues, they seem to be succeeding.

The other publication that’s recently come to our attention does not offer the same tangible experience as Slake, as it’s online only, but its goals are no less laudable. Sampsonia Way is the web magazine of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which hosts persecuted writers from around the world in houses along a street of the same name as its magazine. The history of the homes is fascinating, starting with the first exiled writer-in-residence, who covered his new temporary home in his poetry. As George Packer wrote for The New Yorker:

The first writer was a Chinese poet named Huang Xiang, who had spent twelve years in jail and labor camps for taking part in the Democracy Wall movement. The abuse he endured had been so bad that, when he came to Pittsburgh in 2004, he locked himself in the former crack house and wouldn’t go out. Soon, though, he was up on a ladder, writing his poems in beautiful calligraphy across the exterior walls: an act of self-liberation that turned his banned writing into a startling sight on a street that still looks like the set for an August Wilson play.

Sampsonia Way, the magazine, looks to provide the same shelter offered by the homes on its namesake. “Each defends free speech by protecting the people who actually do the writing and speaking. The homes provide shelter for writers; the magazine provides shelter for their work.”

We encourage you to check out both of these wonderful magazines. It will be worth it, I promise.

Source: Slake, Sampsonia Way  

Image of Huang Xiang’s house on Sampsonia Way by ndanger, licensed under Creative Commons. All other images are of the two magazines written about in this post.  

“The Swiss have mountains, so they climb. Canadians have lakes, so they canoe. The Australians have canyons, so they go canyoneering, a hybrid form of madness halfway between mountaineering and caving in which you go down instead of up, often through wet tunnels and narrow passageways.”

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A rival to the Booker Prize has been announced, sending the literary world into an uproar.

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A black male feminist speaks out.

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Finally, you can carry David Bowie in your wallet.

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Afghanistan, Iraq, Ecuador, Antarctica, and more are the latest citizens of Google Maps’ growing empire of crowdsourced maps.

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For all you typography junkies (you’re out there, right?), Kerntype offers a strangely addictive kerning game, in which you move the letters in words left or right to achieve even spacing and optimal readability.

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One writer’s takeaway from South by Southwest Eco: We should care for the planet not because it makes economic sense, but because it’s the right thing to do.

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Big Agriculture mounts a PR campaign to counter the side effects of Food Inc.

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Let’s downsize Sprawlopolis by shifting property taxes to land dues.

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Gibson Guitar hits a sour note with environmentalists as it cozies up to the Tea Party.

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Murder City: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime offers a world map detailing homicide rates around the world.

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An upstart newspaper files dispatched from the edge of capitalism. Introducing, the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

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How do you get people to attend a reading? Host a Literary Death Match.

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The big business of televised food is bigger than you think. The ice in a beverage, for example, might be made of acrylic and cost $500 a cube.

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The decline and fall of America’s decline and fall.

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Puff, puff, pour? Leave it to the gourmands to add marijuana to upscale beers and wines.

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This new medical device is like a super soaker for the burn unit: It coats a burn victim’s wound with their own skin cells, allegedly healing the injury in days instead of weeks.

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Snarky t-shirt or serious chic? A design writer for imprint teases out the difficulties of choosing what to wear to a protest.

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What if Facebook developed a web browser to challenge Google?

Image by spacecadet, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Before Indian summer is done, listen to the sound of crickets and katydids one last time. (And read a review of the book Cricket Radio here.)

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Hypersensitivity is good, according to Psychology Today.

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A dictatorial government recognizes—and attempts to restrict—the power of art. Check out the shift from avant-garde to realistic art in children’s books under Soviet rule.

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It takes a village to save a drowning farm.

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Gals, forget Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Order your copy of “Men of the Stacks,” a calendar of dreamy male librarians.

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American politicians and scientists are afraid to tackle the big challenges—like space exploration, environmental degradation, and renewable energy—argues science fiction author Neal Stephenson.

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The American Scholar, the quarterly publication that won the 2011 Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing, is now on Tumblr.

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The New York Review of Books asks, Is Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry “another slicked up trashmouth”?

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Booing a gay soldier? Cheering execution? Stop this now, says Susan Brooks at the Washington Post.

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Reporting for Mother Jones, Mac McClelland wonders why an indicted warlord isn’t in the Hague if even she can find him.

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Awesome Food (the Awesome Foundation’s food chapter) announces its very first $1,000 grant winner: Compost Mobile, a Miami home pick-up service for food scraps.

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Do you want to speed up or slow down? Nissan and Swiss scientists are developing a car that can read your mind.

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Open Minds wonder: Are they UFOs or biodegradable floating lanterns?