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PHILIP EIL

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With soda under siege, Yacht Club

Confections
If soda were a person, it would need a publicist. Those sweet, sugary bubbles — once the image of wholesome Americana — have lately been blamed for rotting teeth, obesity, even teenage aggression.

By: PHILIP EIL | June 20, 2012

Mothers News tackles cheesecake and Left-Handers Day

This Just In
"No offense, but you guys are no competition," Jacob Berendes tells me.

By: PHILIP EIL | June 06, 2012

In DeSilva’s mystery Cliff Walk, fact and fiction blur

True Crime
There is a moment in Bruce DeSilva's new book, Cliff Walk , when the novel's hero — a wisecracking, coffee-swilling investigative reporter named Liam Mulligan — flops on his mattress to read a book by former Tampa Tribune reporter Ace Atkins. "Crime novels were his parachute out of the newspaper business," Mulligan says. "If only I had that kind of talent."

By: PHILIP EIL | May 30, 2012

A spoon-bending mentalist takes on the Gaspee affair

History Dept.
Plaques and parades are nice, but the real story of the HMS Gaspee — the British customs schooner looted and burned off the coast of Rhode Island in the run-up to the Revolutionary War — is not rated "G."

By: PHILIP EIL | May 23, 2012

OBEY THE GIANT debuts

Film Dept.
A black Lincoln Town Car drives through the darkened streets of Providence.

By: PHILIP EIL | May 16, 2012

When the hipster label hurts

Religious Studies
Don't call it a "cool church," pastor Andrew Mook says.

By: PHILIP EIL | May 09, 2012

The launch of PVD Pudding Pops

Sweets.
Valeria Khislavsky woke up in the middle of the night last summer with an idea: she was going to sell pudding. It was a mysterious vision, she says. She didn't have any particular attachment to pudding as a child; she isn't obsessed with pudding pop pitchman Bill Cosby. But it was, in a way, perfectly logical.

By: PHILIP EIL | May 15, 2012

Are Rhode Islanders finally ready to recognize Providence-born H.P. Lovecraft's legacy as a horror writing hero?

Loving embrace?
Brett Rutherford was walking down College Street on an overcast day in the late 1990s when a car with Oregon license plates pulled up next to him.

By: PHILIP EIL | April 25, 2012

Concert tickets: how the public got scalped

Marketplace
As the founder of jambands.com, the author of The Phishing Manual: Compendium to the Music of Phish (1996), and an editor of Relix magazine, Dean Budnick knows how live music works.

By: PHILIP EIL | April 18, 2012

Coffee with Brown University’s Puzzlemaster

Games
In September of 2010, the New York Times published a week's worth of crossword puzzles created by Brown University students

By: PHILIP EIL | April 11, 2012

ULTRA takes in the Pauly D Project

Nightclubbing
It was just after 10:30 at the ULTRA nightclub in Providence last Thursday night and general manager Garry Williams was sitting in the office, watching one of the club's former bouncers, "Big Jerry" Gialanella, on television say, "You got the fog goin'. You got the music bumpin'. The lights are strobin'."

By: PHILIP EIL | April 04, 2012

Meditations on 'My Friend Dahmer'

Comics Dept.
It's possible that you already know how the cartoonist, Derf Backderf's, latest graphic novel ends.

By: PHILIP EIL | March 21, 2012

At the hip-hop high school

Education Dept.
In his new book, Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education , Sam Seidel describes a sign hanging at the juvenile detention facility in Cranston.

By: PHILIP EIL | March 14, 2012

Cirque de Ville will go over the top at the Dorrance

Three-Ring Dept.
It doesn't take a particularly agile imagination to step back in time at the Dorrance, the restaurant and bar that opened in the old Union Trust bank building downtown last fall. The marble floors, the high ceilings, the stained-glass windows — they all summon the structure's pre-Prohibition past.

By: PHILIP EIL | February 22, 2012

The Providence Postcard Project: Love letters to a city

Missives
The Big Blue Bug is here.

By: PHILIP EIL | February 01, 2012

At StyleWeek: Mops, Marie Claire, and the Mayor

Scenes
Techno music is thumping through L'Apogee, the bar at the top of the Providence Biltmore.

By: PHILIP EIL | January 25, 2012

A throwback to the bombshell

Pretty Pictures
"Is this really my life?" LuLu Locks asks. "I'm waking up this morning to go play Barbie dress-up with grown women?"

By: PHILIP EIL | January 18, 2012

Staring down Whitey Bulger

Mobsters
Jon Land's latest thriller begins in a South Boston basement where a man named John McIntyre has been handcuffed to a chair, slammed in the head with a chair leg, and strangled with a length of sailing rope.

By: PHILIP EIL | January 11, 2012

The piano man lands on Point Street

Music Dept.
When Point Street Dueling Pianos opens its doors in the coming weeks, some patrons will recognize the bare brick walls and angled windows as the former home of the Hi-Hat — the respected, if slightly under-attended, jazz club that closed earlier this year.

By: PHILIP EIL | December 14, 2011

Geoffrey Wolff and the ‘pee-wee metropolis’

English Dept.
Jeffrey Eugenides entered a select club last month when he published his novel, The Marriage Plot . His ticket for admission was a sentence on page 9 that began, "Providence was a corrupt town, crime ridden and mob-controlled . . . ."

By: PHILIP EIL | December 01, 2011

Carl and Keith Johnson are spreading the ghostly gospel

Supernatural sleuths
Rhode Island's Ghost Rush — the books, the TV shows, the tours — often seems built to squeeze a little money out of a haunted economy.

By: PHILIP EIL | October 26, 2011

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