Gabra Zackman is a new kind of acting star: she is heard, but unheard-of.

Ms. Zackman had classical training through the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, has worked in regional theaters for the last two decades and has had a sprinkling of appearances on television shows like “Law and Order.” Those performances, however, have brought neither fame nor fortune.

Instead, like a growing number of actors, she has found steady employment as a reader in the booming world of audiobooks...

Last October, the day before Newsweek announced it would be shutting down its print edition, Peter Bilak launched a crowdfunding campaign for Works That Work, a new design magazine that is experimenting with a new, crowdsourced distribution strategy.

Based in The Hague, Works That Work has been “circulated” as far as San Francisco, Russia, and Brazil in the hands of readers, friends, and backers who pick up copies at half price from central hubs and sell them to friends, bookstores, and other outlets...

The Supreme Court’s embrace of gay rights last week had an almost serene majesty. The obvious correctness of the Court’s judgment, its curt dismissal of a monstrous injustice, had a grandeur that requires little elaboration. Yet the decision had its roots in something prosaic and largely forgotten: the midterm elections of 1986. Until that point in Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, the loyal opposition was more loyal than opposed to the genial Californian in the White House, but Democrats came roaring back, winning control of the Senate with eight new seats...

Fifty years ago — on June 25, 1963 — Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 had its US premiere in New York City. It’s a transparently autobiographical film about a world famous director unable to finish his next film, beset by doubts, anxieties, and nightmares. As the film opens, our hero Guido, Fellini’s alter ego, played by Marcello Mastroianni, faces a dilemma that may be familiar to many: What if your deadline arrived, but you had written nothing? What if people came to hear you, but you had nothing to say? What would happen if you ran out of ideas?...

Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder, and Charles Lindbergh suffered from the same menal illness.

The man could not stand dirt. When he built his company’s first factory in Fremont, Calif., in 1984, he frequently got down on his hands and knees and looked for specks of dust on the floor as well as on all the equipment. For Steve Jobs, who was rolling out the Macintosh computer, these extreme measures were a necessity. “If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless,” the Apple co-founder later recalled, “then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.” This perfectionist also hated typos. As Pam Kerwin, the marketing director at Pixar during Jobs’ hiatus from Apple, told me, “He would carefully go over every document a million times and would pick up on punctuation errors such as misplaced commas.” And if anything wasn’t just right, Jobs could throw a fit...

This week, North Park resident Jeff Olson will appear in court to fight a charge of 13 counts of misdemeanor vandalism charges for writing protest slogans in chalk from February to August 2012. The charges could send Olson to jail for 13 years and put him on the hook for $13,000 in restitution to the City and to Bank of America...

The death of The Oregonian as you know it came at 9:58 am on June 20.

That’s when reporters, editors, photographers and designers who put out the 163-year-old daily newspaper were told to “please proceed” to a large basement conference room. 

Such meetings at the newspaper—especially on short notice—are unusual at The Oregonian’s headquarters at 1320 SW Broadway. But the staff knew what it was about.

For months, there had been speculation The Oregonian’s owners, the Newhouse family, intended to cut back the publication schedule of the newspaper, rely more on its website to deliver news, and make deep cuts in staff...

From glue-covered sticks in Egypt hang tow lives, and a question: How can we stop the slaughter of song irds migrating across the Mediterranean?

In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw the disapproval in my face and called out sarcastically, in Arabic: "You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don't feel bad about dropping bombs on someone's homeland."...

In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard, Yale, Bard, Pomona, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t...

The Apple co-founder tells Lloyd Grove why he supports the NSA leaker, how the agency hasn't 'done one thing valuable for us' in regard to Prism -- and why the Internet wasn't supposed to be this way.

Computer whiz Steve Wozniak is more than a little distressed that the technology he helped develop nearly four decades ago is being used on a massive scale to invade people’s privacy.

“I think he’s a hero,” said the 62-year-old Wozniak...