“World-class cities need world-class culture. FEASTIVAL celebrates both our artistic and culinary scenes, two great economic engines that push Philadelphia forward,” said FringeArts Board President Richard Vague. Philadelphia’s cultural economy is world-class and nothing represents our dynamic and innovative arts scene better than FringeArts (formerly known as the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe). In its seventeenth year, the annual 16-day Festival brings the best in contemporary, innovative and ground-breaking art to Philadelphia and fills the city with daring artistic performances, international legends, and local pioneers. For the past three years, this premier arts festival joined forces with […]

  FRESH AIR Since the beginning of June, Barton Gellman has been reporting on classified intelligence documents given to him by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. As a result of the Snowden leaks, Gellman and reporter Laura Poitras of the PRISM program, which mines data from nine U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook. Gellman, who has been writing for The Washington Post, also that the NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress expanded the agency’s powers in 2008. He that the U.S. has conducted […]

  THE QUIET VOLUME Enter the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience. The latest of Ant Hampton’s autoteatro works, a self-generated and “automatic” performance places the audience as performer and spectator. During regular hours at the Free Library of Philadelphia, two audience members sit side-by-side with headphones on. Cues some from words written and whispered, guiding an unlikely path through a pile of books. The slightest sounds from the headphones become intensely clear—or perhaps that sound came from an actual library patron shifting chair or closing a book. The Quiet Volume exploits the particular tension common to […]

Photo by JAQUES-JEAN TIZIOU Pay Up Pig Iron Theatre Company with the University of the Arts Step into a labyrinthine, choose-your-own adventure about buying and selling everything under the sun. Philadelphia’s premier physical theater company re-imagines its 2005 show, post financial crisis style. Part circus, part laboratory experiment, part shopping experience, Pay Up is a pay-as-you-go race against the clock to pick what plays you want to see. You are given plastic booties, five one-dollar bills, and led into all-white warehouse space that has been converted into eight experimental labs/performance rooms, along with hallways, a gathering space, and backrooms. With a loudspeaker […]

FRESH AIR Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, left the White House in 1921, after serving two terms, but today he remains a divisive figure. He’s associated with a progressive income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve. During his re-election bid, he campaigned on his efforts to keep us out of World War I, but in his second term, he led the country into that war, saying we had to make the world safe for democracy. The move ended America’s isolationism and ushered in a new era of American military and foreign policy. A. Scott Berg is the first […]

Photo via @PPAwatch NBC10: A van parked in front of a fire hydrant. A sedan parked in front of a handicapped spot. These are just a few of the many photos posted by a new Twitter account documenting illegal parking in Philadelphia. But here’s the twist. The pictures aren’t of normal vehicles but instead, those that belong to the Philadelphia Parking Authority.  The account, @PPAwatch, is cracking down on the PPA by posting driver-submitted photos of the parking authority violating their own rules. Yet just as the account was beginning to gain more followers, it was suddenly suspended over the […]

  AL JAZEERA: The FBI released a heavily redacted document on Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, Monday, which revealed the law-enforcement agency is continuing to investigate what it characterized as “controversial reporting” by the journalist, who died in a late-night car crash in Los Angeles in June. The FBI turned over the three-page document to Al Jazeera and Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research, in response to a joint-Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the agency. The papers revealed that the FBI still considers Hastings’ work highly sensitive; even […]

  PENNSYLAVANIA STATE NURSES ASSOCIATION: It is the position of PSNA that medical marijuana is worthy of further rigorous clinical testing. In order to weigh the true risks and benefits of medical marijuana, there must be a discussion and openness at the federal level regarding the conversion of marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug classification. Schedule II classification would allow testing of consistent grade medical marijuana in a randomized controlled fashion in order to ascertain the drug’s risk/benefit profile for a multitude of illnesses and symptoms. In addition, PSNA supports protection from prosecution for patients who currently […]