Blogophobia: an irrational fear, intolerance of, or aversion to the blogosphere. Martin Amis has been accused of far worse, but after hearing him talk at RADA yesterday evening, this was the only accusation we felt it safe to lodge against him. The offending remark came early in the evening when, during his reading from the recently published The Second Plane, Amis effectively dissed Londonist and its ilk as “semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere”. Gauntlet,......

Even on its quietest weeks, London is something of a happy haven for bibliophiles such as ourselves, though we may be doing nothing more than perusing one of the city’s many lovely bookshops. This week, however, we’re in a veritable book geek heaven, as the London literary scene goes all glittery, playing host to some major names and fantastic events, leaving us tongue-tied and weak at the knees. Do we gush? Very well then,......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

This week - Denzel Washington goes back in time (Déjà Vu) and a horrible Christmas slasher, (Black Christmas). We're going to be frank. There really isn't anything exciting that has come out this week. Even the reviews are pretty boring. Go and see Pan's Labyrinth if you haven't already, go to a Carol concert, give a goose to your poor employee's family, if you don't his tiny becrutched son will surely die. First up,......

This day in London’s History 1978: Man executed with brolly. Unless you live in Chile, the date September 11 will only ever be remembered for the one, obvious historical event. Of course, plenty of other stuff can claim today as its anniversary, including the remarkable story of the man who was assassinated by umbrella. The writer, BBC broadcaster and Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was approaching a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge, when he felt......

It's come to our attention that our very own motley crew, Towers Of London, have turned down the opportunity to re-record the classic: I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles for West Ham because they're Everton fans... Is that really news? Anyways, we thinks this is a good thing because we're still waiting for Michael Jackson's definitive version of the song. In completely related news chubby cheeseballers Keane are back. Hooray! They're playing a surprise, intimate gig......

Did you know that our alert level had dropped? Well it has. As of the end of last week we're at 'Severe General' for the first time since July 7 (we were at 'Critical' before). The reason being that "intelligence sources do not have any specific information relating to imminent repeat attacks." Not that that's ever stopped them before. However, the only reason we know about this is becasue the Tories kicked up a......

Is it yet possible to write something about German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen without mentioning his little 9/11 faux pas? (Oh wait, the Guardian just did...) For those of you who might not remember, just five days after September 11, that wacky Karlheinz declared at a press conference that the attack on the World Trade Center was, in fact, "das grosste Kunstwerk, das es je gegeben hat." For those of you with rusty German, that......