Cafe Creativity

You need social skills to have a conversation in real life -- but they're quite different from the skills you need to write good dialogue. Educator Nadia Kalman suggests a few "anti-social skills," like eavesdropping and muttering to yourself, that can help you write an effective dialogue for your next story.

The design process for problem-solving, in 4 steps.

What makes us giggle and guffaw? The inability to define comedy is its very appeal; it is defined by its defiance of definition. Addison Anderson riffs on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Aristotle to elucidate how a definition draws borders while comedy breaks them down.

You're in a movie theater, watching the new horror flick. The audience knows something that the main character does not. The audience sees the character's actions are not in his best interest. What's that feeling -- the one that makes you want to shout at the screen? Christopher Warner identifies this storytelling device as dramatic irony.

Leaps and bounds separate that which is ironic and that which many people simply say is ironic. Christopher Warner wants to set the record straight: Something is ironic if and only if it is the exact opposite of what you would expect.

At face value, the lines between verbal irony, sarcasm, and compliments can be blurry. After all, the phrase 'That looks nice' could be all three depending on the circumstances. In the final of a three part series on irony, Christopher Warner gets into the irony you may use most often and most casually: verbal irony.

Composer Steve Hackman is creating mash-ups, like Drake & Tchaikovsky or Radiohead & Brahms, so more people will learn to love classical music.

What exactly makes a poem ... a poem? Poets themselves have struggled with this question, often using metaphors to approximate a definition. Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream? Melissa Kovacs shares three recognizable characteristics of most poetry.

Replika is a chatbot that creates a digital representation of you. It's strange and fascinating -- but the story behind it is even better.

Performance artist and unlikely chef Tom Brown is bringing strangers together around the tiny kitchen, where he's serving up tiny foods and words of wisdom. Along with his fully functional portable kitchen, Tom has made more than 300 utensils and tools that he uses to cook up real, edible miniature foods. He may be passing out free lunches, but the gifts he gets from his customers are worth all the work.

Last round, my efforts to recreate the fabled McDonald's Szechuan Sauce were wild, flailing shots in the dark, pathetic and meager attempts to recreate a long-lost condiment out of scanty information and back-alley sources.

There's milk, dark, white, and now, ruby chocolate. It's made naturally from ruby cocoa beans and tastes sour.

Rodney Dangerfield made a career on thumbing his nose at social mores, making sexual advances toward older women, and eating a giant sandwich made out of hors d'oeuvres.

This sustainable initiative is helping to save Haiti's forests.

Regular Show regularly shows some fantastical and impossible food items - sandwiches that kill you, wings that kill you, skydiving pizza pockets - but few are quite so worthy of recreation as the Ultimeatum, the burger-within-a-burger-between-two-burgers. And ketchup from the Himalayas. Follow along this week to see if we can beat Chef Ajay Maldonaldo at his own game.

We had a panel of kids prepare and taste test 100 years of sandwiches from 1900 to today. Here's what they thought about PBJs, po' boys, paninis, and everything in between.

Pre-order my first cookbook, Eat What You Watch: A Cleverly-Titled Romp Through the Fanciful Fetes of Fiction! Really it's just called Eat What You Watch, but I totally should have called it that instead.

A 31-year-old woman has turned her back on expensive rents and property prices - by living full time in a van. With an interior measuring just 13ft 2in long, 5ft 8in wide and 6ft 2in high, Eileah Ohning's home is her Freightliner Sprinter High Top van. The photographic producer from Columbus, Ohio, has lived in her compact four-wheel home since May 2017. Complete with a memory foam mattress, storage compartments, a desk and a camping stove, she even has plans to add in a shower, toilet and fridge. Eileah parks her van close enough to her workplace that she never needs to worry about the morning commute and showers at her local gym.

Wes Anderson's films are rife with clashing color schemes, furrow-browed pedantry, and rich character development set against an oddly symmetrical backdrop. In the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, it's also home to a pastry as precious as its parentage.

Visiting Sideshow Collectiblers's massive booth at Comic-Con is always a treat, because the collectibles company puts stunning prototypes of figures and statues on display. We pick our favorite things at this year's booth, including a sixth-scale Hulkbuster and a life-size K-2SO from Star Wars!

The Impossible Burger is meatless, but it tastes, smells, and bleeds like the real thing. The secret ingredient? Neuroscience.