Applying big data analysis to Internet Adult Film Database, the IMDB of porn.

In a matter of months she became one of the world’s most famous porn stars. Three years later, she was dead. The rise and fall of Savannah.

He was a nobody who became a porn star, a porn star who became a destitute freebaser, an addict who set up his dealer to be robbed, and finally witness to a retaliatory massacre at the house they called Wonderland.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

A profile Hunter Moore,  the founder of the controversial revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up.

A profile of Candy Barr–porn star pioneer, burlesque legend, and Texas folk hero.

The dissolution of Brooklyn softcore skin-mag Jacques and the marriage of the couple that created it.

A profile of a porn star on trial.

A profile of a breakout male porn star:

The porn machine churns out performers to satisfy every fantasy, be it MILF, dwarf, fat, granny, or gang bang. But if you’re interested in watching a young, heterosexual, nonrepulsive man engage in sex, James Deen is basically it.

Years of guilt and shame over an obsession with hardcore porn drives the Orthodox Jewish-raised author to meet the the personalities behind the darkest and most distrurbing X-rated subgenres and ask, “Do you ever feel guilty?”

An early profile of Sasha Grey.

Breslin’s unflinching and devastating investigation of the porn industry in Los Angeles would be at home in many an excellent magazine. But Breslin didn’t go that route. Instead, she built a custom site that presents the story with her photographs and design.

-A. Madrigal

At the very bottom of the porn totem pole is the “mope”, a barely paid assistant who hangs around and occasionally performs. Stephen Hill was mope-ing for Ultima Studios in exchange for pocket money and a place to crash. Learning he was going to be evicted, he sharpened a prop machete.

On the group of friends who came to rule the bizarre, decreasingly lucrative world of Internet porn.

How Internet porn has altered the ways we think about, and engage in, sex.

“In 1995 I was hired as entertainment editor of Hustler magazine at Larry Flynt Publications.” Gang-bang buffet tables, deeply earnest ‘Letters to the Editor’, ghost-writing Kierkegaard references into model bios in Barely Legal, and how a half-decade of reviewing porn erodes the thin line between the author’s alter egos and self.

New technology has historically been a friend to the porn industry, first VHS, then online DVD sales. But free streaming sites like YouPorn have sent the establishment into a tailspin, and due to anonymous domain registration, they don’t even know who their competition is. Will the internet kill porn?

Inside the bleak world of Joe Francis, the man behind the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise.

An excerpt from Zak Smith’s We Did Porn detailing an appearance by porn star Sasha Grey on The Tyra Banks Show.