As it becomes more likely that the use of handheld gadgets while driving will be banned, the Globe tossed out a thought worth debating--if drivers are still allowed to use headsets, will they drive better? Or is the mere act of talking the problem? Noah Bierman talked to an MIT engineer who said, "Conversations are the problem, not the phone." A Virginia Tech researcher added that the act of trying to dial was also distracting.......

Four Stories The Bitter End: Stories of loss, endings, and final acts Featuring Jeremiah Healey, Drew Johnson, Julia Glass, and Joan Wickersham The Enormous Room 
(567 Mass Ave,
 Central Square) Monday, December 3 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. Free! Four Stories is a unique reading series: Boston-based but also Japan-based, set in a bar, and featuring four writers instead of just one, the event proves that readings don’t have to be torture. The unorthodox setting and......

BC was hoping for results similar to, or better than, the last time they saw Virginia Tech. That was the game back in October when the Hokies outplayed the Eagles for about 90% of the game, until Matt Ryan led an improbable comeback to keep BC's ACC title (and, at the time, national title hopes) alive. Well, so much for that. Virginia Tech outplayed BC for most of the game, including the last few minutes,......

As tempting as it would have been for the Bruins to come out swinging last night, playing back the Flyers for Patrice Bergeron's concussion, that's not how they roll. And they needed the two points even more than they needed the visceral satisfaction of seeing the Flyers laid out like the wounded soldiers in Gone With the Wind. The 6-3 shellacking wasn't exactly a tea party, though. Defenseman Andrew Alberts left the game after a......

Any objective observer would agree that last night's game was a game the Celtics honestly didn't deserve to win. They didn't shoot well, they looked tired after the Laker game, and they were facing a Bobcat team that may have no identity whatsoever, but played with spunk and energy the whole time. Things looked especially dismal down two with five seconds to go. Paul Pierce missed a game-tying shot, and Charlotte got the rebound. Boston......

Jonah Lehrer Wednesday, November 14, 7:00 pm Harvard Book Store, Cambridge If you are inclined toward the sciences, the elegant volume Proust Was a Neuroscientist is a gateway drug to literature and the arts, and vice versa. Jonah Lehrer, who has worked as a prep cook, a lab tech, and a writer, pulls together what he's learned to show how creative types have anticipated neurological advances through their work. This book demonstrates that the humanities......

The story about a Boston priest getting arrested for stalking Conan O'Brien keeps getting weirder, if that's possible. Reverend David Ajemian, 46, who attended Milton and Harvard and who was a local priest, was nabbed trying to get into an O'Brien taping. The Smoking Gun has documents that show Ajemian may be even stranger than previously thought. Letters indicate that Ajemian was mad at John McEnroe as well, and he claimed that McEnroe assaulted them......

A somewhat abbreviated Redux, since we're preparing for our live-blog of NFL Armageddon this afternoon. Let's start with the bad and end on a high note. First, the Bruins. They went to Ottawa last night to play the Senators, who are 11-1 and running away with the Northeast Division. So now the Bruins know how it feels to play any of the other teams from Boston. It was close, and the B's even led at......

Donnie Darko American Repertory Theatre Based on the screenplay by Richard Kelly Adapted and directed by Marcus Stern October 27 - November 18 Zero Arrow Theatre, Cambridge Ticket and performance information Bostonist has always wanted to speak with someone who actually saw Richard Kelly's 2001 drama "Donnie Darko" in a movie theater during its original run. Given the fact it was only shown on 58 screens nationwide during that brief October 2001 run, our odds......

If what they say is true, and Curt Schilling truly pitched his last game as a member of the Boston Red Sox last night... Let there be no mistake. The dividing line between the Sox' Era of Perpetual Failure and the current Golden Years can easily be geotagged; it's somewhere between Theo Epstein's Thanksgiving dinner in Arizona and the first time Curt posted on the SOSH message board. Somewhere in that stretch, the Red Sox......

"That's not the way we drew it up," said Colorado manager Clint Hurdle. "Obviously we have to change our game plan," added Todd Helton. "You can't make any mistakes," chimed in shellshocked starting pitcher Jeff Francis. If you're Colorado, what else can you say? The team that charged through September and most of October, and held Arizona to eight total runs in their mockery of an NLCS, looked like they hadn't played baseball in eight......

Anyone who questions that old phrase "idle hands are the devil's tools" ought to take a look at what happens in sports cities when the games are in desperately short supply. When no one's playing, people get ansty. They start speculating. Guessing. Predicting. Complaining - and no good can come of that. We need sports action, people! Thank goodness the Bruins are set to answer the call tonight, when they face off on the ice......

A benefit screening of Roller Boogie for the Boston Derby Dames will be Friday, September 14, at midnight, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. The Boston Derby Dames don't mess around. When the Boston Derby Dames want to kick off their second season, they really don't mess around. They break out the big guns - Linda Blair. Linda Blair, the headspinning projectile vomiter and child star sweetheart of The Exorcist, did a rollerskating romance flick in......

It's college-ranking time. Of course, these rankings are about as scientific as a game of pin the tail on the donkey, but schools have a lot of fun learning about how other campuses see them. For example, the University of New Hampshire was named one of the top party schools. UNH is no West Virginia University, which appears to have abandoned the pretense of higher education altogether, but UNH was number seven on the party-hearty......

A night after Sox pitcher Kason Gabbard completed a Cinderella-esque nine innings at Fenway Park, the spotlight fell on a different belle of the ball for a fairy tale turn on the mound. The story didn't play out the way we would have written it - it was Leo Nunez, not Tim Wakefield, who was able to celebrate on Tuesday night. Nunez bounced back from a Fenway disaster two years ago to lead Kansas City......

Sherman Alexie will read Thursday, June 7, at 6:00 PM at the Brattle Theatre. Tickets are $2 and available at Porter Square Books. Now - this event is sold out - but do what you gotta do. Novelist, poet, blogger, and serious NBA fan Sherman Alexie's latest book went straight to paperback. That's not a big deal, but it became a big deal to Alexie when Jenny Shank, a reviewer, wondered if the book went......

--The BPD released a statement about a series of eight armed robberies in the South End and Downtown that have a clear pattern. They've robbed a Lindt Chocolate Shop, Ben & Jerry's, Emack and Boulios, Bon Bon, the gift shop at New England Medical Center, Truly Jorg's Patisserie, Papyrus, and Vitamin Shoppe. Perhaps they hit up the Vitamin Shoppe because they realized their robbery diet was on the unhealthy side. Despite their fondness for candy......

Many great cities across these lands of ours are excited and happy to boast when they have one arts festival ready to go for its citizens and visitors. But Boston? An arts festival? That's too easy. What we do is plan a whole slew of 'em and work them all into the same weekend. Take THAT, other so-called culture centers! Bostonist will be telling you over the next couple of days about some of the......

Text messages aren't just our favorite way to vote Sanjaya off of American Idol, they're also the quickest way to get in touch, no matter where we are. The mobile is always close at hand (and usually in the pocket) if we're at a concert, in class, or even in the cube toiling away on our TPS reports a text message won't likely go ignored for long. A number of US colleges and universities have......

We're a little late with this one, but we had to mention this incident from Emmanuel College. What took place wasn't a crime, but it will forever be marked in the Annals of Poor Taste. An adjunct professor at Emmanuel College re-enacted the Virginia Tech massacre in class – using dry-erase markers. He did it to make the pro-gun point that the Virginia Tech shooter could have been stopped if another student had a gun,......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

--The guy who threatened another Virginia Tech because he got dumped has been arraigned. Andrew Rosenblum must stay at his parents' home in Needham, and he has to wear a GPS monitoring device. BU and Wheelock College, the school that the recipients of his threatening e-mail attended, have banned him from their campuses. His lawyer called him an "immature young man." Indeed. Rosenblum is getting attention not just because he did something incredibly stupid. He......

--At Stonehill College in Easton, a student found five empty shotgun-shell boxes in a parking lot. Given the rampage at Virginia Tech, people got nervous. However, Stonehill College waited four hours before telling students what to do. The school met with Easton Police before evacuating a dorm, but one student shot back, "It doesn't take four hours to consult with Easton Police." --Andrew Rosenblum, the part-time BU student who threatened an ex-girlfriend is now facing......

As expected, local universities are evaluating their own security response mechanisms in the hopes of avoiding a rampage similar to what happened at Virginia Tech. Boston police didn't wait around - they held a meeting with representatives from local universities one day after the shootings. (Look on the bright side of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force embarrassment - we already know that the BPD and local law enforcement are fast.) WHDH reports, "The group focused......

The nation is still reeling from the massacre that left, according to DCist, 33 people dead at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. Local news reported this morning that one of the people killed was a student from Saugus named Ross Alameddine. Many people are still puzzled about what exactly happened between the first shooting, which happened in a dormitory, and the second shooting, which happened in a classroom building. An inordinate amount of time -......

According to the Globe, our own Holy Cross was "prepared to get physical" against Southern Illinois in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but that's not quite how things turned out. According to other coaches, the Southern Illinois Salukis are absolutely terrifying. One guy said a team could imitate their defense if "We run down to the police station and we get all the German shepherd attack dogs and we just bring them onto......

We're eagerly waiting to see how our local NCAA matchups shake out. Boston College takes on Texas Tech and Bobby Knight tomorrow, and Holy Cross faces off against Southern Illinois on Friday. In the other big college basketball tournament, the NIT, the UMass Minutemen defeated Alabama in overtime 89 to 87. They'll advance into the next round to play West Virginia. So let's not forget the NIT in the face of March Madness. Speaking of,......

The Massachusetts midterms were downright sane compared to what happened in the rest of the nation. There was voter deception in Virginia. A poll worker strangled a voter in Kentucky (you'd think it would have been the opposite). Computer glitches slowed down voting across the nation. South Carolina's governor wasn't able to vote for himself. Britney Spears divorced K-Fed, which may have been a cultural sign that "The Man" was about to get stuck.......

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for us to claim that all shows should be played outside over the summer. Lucky for us no one listens to our suggestions on venue – so we're heading back inside where the temperature with the AC on is only about five degrees cooler than it is outside. A welcome five degrees, with a tiny bit lower humidity. This week's list hits a variety of shows, something......

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here. What's better than Bostonist ripping off lines of Beatles songs on a Monday? Checking out the Boy Least Likely To show at TT's. What's better than Bostonist ripping off Beatles lyrics on a Tuesday? The Aaron Goldberg Trio's Boston CD release party. What's better…oh you get the point. Check out this week's music picks for......