On the evolution of Nigeria’s booming film industry, which produces 50 full-length features a week.

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

Walter Benjamin, mp3s, and what collecting says about us.

“Fiction writers are good people, usually. There’s a lot of pretenders, but I haven’t met a lot of sons of bitches.”

The uneasy dance of the architecture critic, the big-name architect, the towering new building, and the city beneath it.

A profile of Winona Ryder.

An interview with mind behind both Five Easy Pieces and The Monkees.

A profile of video game artist Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Super Mario Bros.

A profile of 12-year-old actress Elle Fanning, Dakota’s sister.

The director of Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours on his aversion to America, the advantages of small budgets, and the challenges of directing the opening ceremony for the London Olympics.

“Why are you putting all that muddle in your brain that’s not needed to be there?”

An interview about why giving interviews is totally worthless.

A profile of the late artist and author Norris Church Mailer, who stayed with her husband Norman despite his notorious philandering.

Thoughts on an emerging brand of feminism and the ridiculousness of claiming that Tina Fey is unattractive.

A profile of Larry David, with a focus on his years as a struggling stand-up. “I was hoping that somehow I could get some kind of cult following and get by with that.”

A globe-trotting, pre-CCTV profile of architect Rem Koolhaas.

A profile of Focus Features CEO James Schamus.

On America’s two literary fiction cultures and why one will endure.

On the BBC radio addresses of E.M. Forster: “For one thing, he won’t call what he is doing literary criticism, or even reviewing. His are ‘recommendations’ only. Each episode ends with Forster diligently reading out the titles of the books he has dealt with, along with their exact price in pounds and shillings.”

James Frey is starting a publishing company, paying young writers (very poorly) to reverse engineer a Twilight-esque hit.

The story that certified Gehry as a genius and the Guggenheim Bilbao as the building of the late 20th century.

What happens when a decades old video, featuring the artist Larry Rivers’ prepubescent daughters bare-chested, is claimed both as child pornography and as an important part of the archive of a major American painter.

A profile of of Courtney Love.

The macabre, ultra-violent plays put on at the Grand Guignol defined an era in Paris, attracting foreign tourists, aristocrats, and celebrities. Goering and Patton saw plays there in the same year. But the carnage of WWII ultimately undermined the shock of Guignol’s brutality, and audiences disappeared.

The difference between a social network and a movie about a social network, and what it says about the Facebook generation.

The young Woody Allen writes jokes for supper club comedians, decides he will never make it as a performer and then does, idolizes and is snubbed by Mort Sahl, and develops the comic persona which will make him a star.