Construction Maison

On a sunny summer weekday , a 15- passenger van pulled into the Woodland Park apartment complex in north Madison. A bunch of kids stood on the curb, assembled in a pseudo line, waiting for the van, excited and jostling for a better position. “You guys got Cheetos?” a little boy yelled out. The kids know the drill: the van comes every day to bring them free lunch and they wait as the volunteers set up the day's offerings: first carrots, then yogurt, crackers, a fruit snack, sandwich and juice boxes. The service is from The River Food Pantry as part of its Madison Urban Nutritional Children ’s Hotspot (MUNCH) program. When school’s not in session, MUNCH delivers lunch to kids eight north side low -income neighborhoods who might otherwise go without. THE NEED: ‘THIS IS ALL WE HAVE’ The MUNCH program started last summer and delivered over 10,000 lunches in 2016. This year, they’ve added more neighborhoods to their route and have already delivered over 30,000, with an average of ab...

"You walk without a sense of purpose," a Berkeley bar manager once told James "Peaches" Lucas before firing him. A dedicated climber who spent 15 years living out of caves, tents, and then a Saturn station wagon to pursue the sport, Lucas stumbles through life but marches to the boulders, crags, and walls. Peaches Preaches is his monthly column. Photos from the author's dirtbag days, circa 2004.  "You ain't no dirtbag, home boi," a Seattle climber wrote me in a direct message on Instagram. "You talk as though you are because you have been doing it since 2001. You are not a dirtbag; you have Instagram, for crying out loud!" The unsolicited slander caused me to reflect on the dirtbag experience and my role in promoting it. In the past decade, the climbing community has grasped onto the idea that being a dirtbag—that being deliberately impoverished in order to scrap and save every last penny to go climbing—is “cool.” The Seattle climbe...

Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic / Getty Images I don’t remember when Joss Whedon went from being a garden-variety household name to being someone I refer to on a first-name basis. I quote Joss, I verb Joss, I adjective Joss . As a woman who was once a teenage girl who grew up with Buffy, I’ve internalized more than my fair share of lessons from Our Lady of Buffdom. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve known Joss Whedon as the creator of a feminist hero. For the better part of the same twenty years, Kai Cole knew Joss Whedon as her partner and husband. He was just Joss to her, too — far more intimately Joss than to any of his first-name-basis-ing fans. This weekend, Cole wrote about her divorce with Joss in a post on The Wrap . She writes about how, on their honeymoon in England in 1995, she encouraged him to turn his script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which had just been misinterpreted as a film — into a television show. Joss apparently hadn ’t wanted to work in television anym...

There were nine of us living in my first flat in Paris. It was grand on the outside, with a trompe l’oeil and marble staircase in the entrance hall, but grimy and dark inside. Only three of my flatmates had full-time jobs, and they all smoked. All the lights in the hall were broken. I moved there from London nearly four years ago, during the gloomiest days of François Hollande’s presidency, long before the youthful reformer Emmanuel Macron took power this year. Economic growth at the time was weak, unemployment double that of the UK today, and polls showed two-thirds of French people thought the nation was in “decline”. My flatmates, who I found online, were all 25- to 35-year-olds from the provinces who had come to Paris to find work and, passing their days in our tiny kitchen, were victims of this faded France. Within rigid labour markets many struggled to find jobs, or the right jobs, and were frustrated and angry. They protested in the street, talked incessantly about politics a...

'Your home is wherever you stop and that's what's really, really cool about that whole idea' Rain patters on the roof of John Salhany's 2006 Mercedes Sprinter van as he points out the half-finished ceiling of tongue-and- groove pine paneling that will eventually continue down the walls over layers of plywood and reflective insulation. Items strewn in the hollowed back include a dusty climbing rope , a road bike and a six-pack of Upslope Brewing Company 's Citra Pale Ale . All his essentials will soon have their places once the van build-out is complete, when Salhany will have a bed big enough to accommodate all 6 feet, 2 inches of him, a countertop with a sink and drawers, and maybe even a backsplash with the cutout of the mountains — amenities like that of a house. "I have a lot of friends who are buying houses right now who are just getting to that age, all on the East Coast and I'm just like, how do you guys know where you want to live?" said...

TOLLING THE TYCOONS — Albanese calls for 'politically popular' pied-à-terre tax, by POLITICO New York’s Conor Skelding : Foreign "oligarchs" who own real estate in New York but don't live in the city should have to pay two or three times what they pay now in property taxes, Democratic mayoral candidate Sal Albanese said Wednesday. The "politically popular" new tax's revenue, which Albanese said would amount to billions, could then be put toward the development of affordable housing . "Look, there's a lot of money across the world that people want to outsource," he said during a news conference outside the gates of City Hall. "There's a lot of money there, and we can use that to build real affordable housing ." Mayor Bill de Blasio promised years ago to "take a look" at a pied-à-terre tax, but the proposal is opposed by many of the city's real estate interests . "They own Bill de Blasio , big real estat...

Fans of best-selling crime novelist  Laura Lippman  will want to be sitting down for this announcement. Lippman’s next book, Sunburn ( William Morrow ), may come out in February 2018, but you can start reading it now. That’s right—Lippman, author of the acclaimed Tess Monaghan series , has exclusively shared the jaw-dropping cover of Sunburn for the very first time with  Parade , and she’s also giving us a sneak peek at the first few chapters. (Spoiler alert: We’re already hooked on Lippman’s newest characters, and you will be too.) When you’re done staring at the gorgeous cover, read on for an excerpt from  Sunburn . OneJune 11, 1995Belleville, Delaware It’s the sunburned shoulders that get him. Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing, as she’s doing right now in an absentminded way. The skin has started sloughing off, soon those narrow shoulders won ’t b...