The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

After a final film, Kevin Smith is going to retire to a life of podcasting and speaking tours. Or so he says.

On Christian Marclay’s film The Clock.

The emergence of a radio phenomenon popular amongst young demographic believed lost to interactive distractions.

A profile of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Text from the books and Foster Wallace’s corresponding annotations:

Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

On David Milch; Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush, literature professor, longtime junkie, creator of NYPD Blue, Deadwood (which was in production when this profile was written), and the forthcoming racetrack-set HBO series Luck.

A decade later, on the then twenty-three-year-old Van Morrison’s 1968 album Astral Weeks.

On David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and his legacy.

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.

On Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

The swinging life and boozy death of the original ladies man, and the story of “the coroner that tampered with his cold, lifeless venereal warts.”

A profile of Zack Snyder, director of Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead, and the upcoming Superman series.

A profile of Grace Coddington, creative director of Vogue and break-out star of The September Issue.

Barry Michels is Hollywood’s most successful therapist cum motivation coach with an approach that combines Jungian psychology, encouraging patients to embrace their dark side, and “three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.”

Peter Zumthor, who recently won the Pritzker Prize after a career of few buildings and mostly modest-in-size projects, on the “architecture of actually making things”

“Howard Stern’s a bad motherfucker, man..if I had to be on six hours a day, it would be just as nasty and foul and not sophisticated. The fact that you’re going to see me do an hour every four years? Reduce Howard Stern to an hour every four years, you’d have the most brilliant comedian who ever lived. It’s not even close.”

An oral history of the Strokes.

On Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and their new Broadway musical about Mormons, which “may just be their highest artistic achievement yet.”

Hollywood makes bad movies because “rotten pictures make money.”

GQ moved up the release of this Charlie Sheen profile: ”The fucking AA shit. The sobriety shit. It was always for other people. I just wanted to get a job back and get enough money to tell everybody to go fuck themselves and then roll like Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra—the good parts of those guys.”

On existing as a girl in the boy’s club that is the world.

Five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of Hollywood’s few genuine family-men and a leading box office attraction; inside his wild descent from star to pariah.

“By the time we got to Woodstock 99 …” In a grim finale, the nineties get their Altamont.

On photographing the former Norma Jeane Mortenson. “I think she was the best light comedienne we have in films today, and anyone will tell you that the toughest of acting styles is light comedy.”—Billy Wilder