Living in the information age has most of us doing mental juggling routines as a matter of course. Are we more distracted and fragmented? Or is this good exercise for us? 

A brief excerpt from Ghostwritten, David Mitchell's debut novel. Describing the personalities of the various London Underground lines.

A short piece addressed to men: do you ask women questions? If not, why not? What is there to be gained from doing so? 

Mark Kurlansky writes books about how food has influenced human history. And other stuff. This is a brief appreciation of what he does, in point form.

A short except from the book Touching: the Human Significance of the Skin, by Ashley Montagu, listing twenty separate and distinct functions of human skin.

Beams and Struts launched one year ago. Here are a few reflections from one Beams contributor and editor on what a person learns from a year of doing these things.

Ivan E Coyote is a spoken word artist, novelist, storyteller and columnist. Her totems include Bill Cosby, writers Barbara Gowdy, Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer, musicians Veda Hille, Laurie Anderson and Rufus Wainwright.

The Harry Potter books. The Da Vinci Code. The Twilight series. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and sequels. In the age of instant messages, Facebook, tweets, texting, how did these thick genre novels by unknown writers reach people on such an unprecedented scale?

A brilliant bit of... satire? Scholarship? Hard to categorize. But a couple of very clever writers wrote this piece, as if the HBO show The Wire were actually an unjustly obscure Victorian novel.

Writing guaranteed to make you hungry.