Arts

Earlier this year, Stephen Fowler, owner of The Monkey's Paw used-book store in Toronto, had an idea.

He wanted a creative way to offload his more ill-favored books — "old and unusual" all, as the store's motto goes — that went further than a $1 bin by the register.

It came in a conversation with his wife: a vending machine.

It's a cold March night in New York, and journalist Susannah Cahalan is watching PBS with her boyfriend, trying to relax after a difficult day at work. He falls asleep, and wakes up moments later to find her having a seizure straight out of The Exorcist. "My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened," Cahalan writes. "I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth."

SPOKANE, Wash. - Classical musicians in Spokane stood outside their theater this weekend, lifting picket signs instead of instruments.

Musicians with the Spokane Symphony are entering week two of a strike over pay cuts. Five concerts have been canceled so far.

Spokane joins a growing list of cities this fall where symphonies have become embroiled in labor disputes -– including Seattle, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Adam Wallstein is the principal timpanist with the Spokane Symphony.

There's nothing like visiting a new landscape to spark the imagination. I just got back from a two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. and Canada. And though it was my own country (the non-Canadian part, at least), it felt completely foreign to my eyes, which are accustomed to the swampy, lush Southeast.