That's one of the relaxing conversation pieces to be found at a ‘Skeptics in the pub’ meetup. Tonight’s guest speaker is Dr Matthew Smith from Liverpool Hope University, who will talk about fate, the meaning of life and mid-life crises. We caught up with co-organiser Sid Rodriques to find out what skepticism is, and whether we should be skeptical of it. How would you define a 'skeptic'? A skeptic is someone who asks for......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

Londonist attended the London Film Festival press launch this morning - we're suckers for a free breakfast. This year is the festivals 50th birthday and by all accounts all the stops have been pulled out to make this years line up a little bit special. Of particular interest to us was the news that Trafalgar Square will play host to A Portrait of London - director Mike Figgis is overseeing a specially commissioned event......

It's not often you get a 'Film of the Week' article where the reviewer has given the picture a one star critque. But with Peter Bradshaw you can kind of understand the deicision. Bradshaw's hatchet jobs are magnificent epics, kind of like John Ford's The Searchers but in review form. So this week we get Bradshaw completely ripping into the Kidman/Penn thriller The Interpreter with vicious abandon: Earth has not anything to show more......

This week, if you're thinking of going to the pictures you've got a choice between a crazed asssassin in Washington, gun crime in Hackney...and Matthew McConaughey taking his shirt off in the desert. At least you can't complain that the choice isn't 'varied'. So first up: The Assassination of Richard Nixon. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw likes this one but not enough to give it more than the 'industry standard' three stars. "Sean Penn......