McKenzie

You would not call Eileen Dunlop “innocent.” A twentysomething with a little college under her belt — even if she’d hadn’t dropped out when her mom died, she still would have become a secretary, what with this being the early 1960s and all — Eileen has her hands full taking care of her permanently drunk, ex-cop dad. She works at a prison for juvenile offenders in a blue-collar Massachusetts burg. If she spies a couple in a car parked near hers, she may shove a fistful of snow down the front of her skirt. (Whether that…

Ben McKenzie thinks you should not listen to famous people when it comes to crypto. Except for him. When other celebrities like Tom Brady and Matt Damon were out there pushing regular investors to ride the digital investing wave, McKenzie — perhaps best known to many as Ryan Atwood on The O.C. — was moving in the opposite direction, warning them to steer clear. It’s not like the industry was banging down his door to appear in their Super Bowl ads in February 2022, anyway. “I wasn’t famous enough to get the offers, so…

In the summer of 2021, I stumbled onto the world cryptocurrency by accident. A friend of mine encouraged me to buy some Bitcoin at the height of the mania, and to be honest, I was tempted. According to media reports, a lot of knuckleheads seemed to be getting rich off these cryptos, whatever the hell they were. I had never paid them much mind before, but I have a degree in economics and these things sure didn’t act like currencies as I understood them. That piqued my interest. It was also Covid and I was bored. Showbiz…

The daytime bustle on Sunset Boulevard was giving way to nighttime flash. Netflix employees were badging out of the Icon, the streaming giant’s cantilevered glass tower. The tire shop was closing up, and tenants at the Harold Apartments were climbing the spiral staircases to their rooftop decks.Nearby, Mckenzie Trahan stood outside the Denny’s restaurant, sobbing into her phone.A hole in a chain-link fence around the restaurant parking lot opened onto a ragged train of tents. They clung to a steep…

As one half of New Zealand’s self-proclaimed “fourth-most-popular guitar-based digi-bongo a cappella-rap-funk-comedy duo” and a composer of tunes from the likes of the Muppets and the Simpsons, Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie is best known for singing songs laden with jokes. It might come as a surprise to some, then, that his debut solo album – released earlier this year – offers quite the opposite experience. Titled, categorically, Songs Without Jokes, it’s a collection of road trip-ready rock numbers inspired by…

Introducing isolines — catchments based on transport networks and journey times.Isolines created in CARTO — keep reading to find out how to create these! Source: CARTOIsolines are an incredibly powerful tool for Data Scientists, showing the areas that can easily access a given location. You may have also heard these referred to as isochrones, trade areas or journey time catchments. No matter their name, the concept is the same — they measure the areas which a site is accessible from based on a set distance or time, such…

When he was “around 14”, Bret McKenzie became obsessed with the Leonard Cohen album I’m Your Man. Its synth-heavy tales of geopolitics, romantic devotion and the poems of Federico García Lorca made it an unusual choice for a pubescent boy in suburban New Zealand. Nevertheless, at school, he and his friends would happily sing along to tracks such as Jazz Police and First We Take Manhattan when passing between lessons.As they sang, McKenzie listened to the voices of his peers, plumbing Cohen’s baritone depths. Meanwhile his…

Life on the streets can get sticky, and this is a litter-strewn hot mess of a story. Moses McKenzie’s debut novel, set in his home town of Bristol, follows dream-chasing Sayon Hughes as he hustles to save enough money to fulfil a fanciful ambition and buy “the house-atop-the-hill” in Clifton. It’s a dream that at times feels as futile as Lennie’s ambition in Of Mice and Men to live off the fat of the land and tend to rabbits.An Olive Grove in Ends is a celebration of community, from domino-playing uncles to drug-addled…