“One afternoon about three days ago the Editorial Enforcement Detail from the Rolling Stone office showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about 40 pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders – in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.”

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

Extracted from the author’s memoir, Life Itself.

The British satirist Auberon Waugh once wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking readers to supply information about his life between birth and the present, explaining that he was writing his memoirs and had no memories from those years. I find myself in the opposite position. I remember everything. All my life I've been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. These retrieved moments I consider and replace on the shelf.

A conversation with the 88-year-old abstract painter.

PALTROW: Did you design camouflage while in the army?

KELLY: I did posters. I was in what they called the camouflage secret army. This was in 1943. The people at Fort Meade got the idea to make rubber dummies of tanks, which we inflated on the spot and waited for Germans to see through their night photography or spies. We were in Normandy, for example, pretending to be a big, strong armored division which, in fact, was still in England. That way, even though the tanks were only inflated, the Germans would think there were a lot of them there, a lot of guns, a whole big infantry. We just blew them up and put them in a field.

“Offhand, there are maybe three times in my life I can clearly recall laughing at something really terrible. One: when my mother told me my grandfather had a heart attack. Two: when a friend and I were driving to Cape Cod and a huge bird careened into the windshield, instantly bonking itself dead. Three: when my friends tried to keep me from going home from a party because they thought my boyfriend might kill me.”

"Look, people's lives are people's lives, and some of them can't cope or be as organized as some of us might like. But it's only in the area of sex that we get involved in the ethics of promoting risk-taking, the idea that we should withhold information or devices because we don't want people to need them. Would you make the same argument about cholesterol drugs? Saying, If we give people a drug that will reduce cholesterol, they won't be as likely to exercise and eat properly like they really should?"

Spun-off from Time Warner and saddled with $1.3 billion in debt as a parting gift, the once-mighty Time Inc needs to reinvent itself. Fast.

A woman travels with a band on the way to their next show.

Catch shares are touted by the government and environmental groups as the solution to overfishing. But for a new generation under the system, the economics consist mainly of “absentee landlords, brokers and bankers, [and] fish quota that costs more than your house.”

Chasing the embers of hedonism in Morocco and Tunisia, as Salafi mobs and new regimes wash over the brothels, beaches, and nightclubs of what used to be the Arab world’s most liberal cities.

Billy Dillon was about to sign a contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead he was convicted–wrongly–of first-degree murder and spent the next 27 years in prison.

“Joe’s hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He’d be conscious the whole time.”

“For the first few days after the surgery, it was difficult to separate out my newly implanted sense from the bits of pain and sensation created by the trauma of having the magnet jammed in my finger.”

“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

Most of the men were in their 60s and 70s, with heart conditions, diabetes, and replacement hips. They made off with millions in cash and jewels, only to give themselves up by not understanding how technology works.

Immigrant nannies leave their own children behind to care for others’.

Welcome to Wakaliwood, where a resourceful producer in the slums of Kampala makes action movies like Who Killed Captain Alex? Uganda’s First Action Movie for about $200 apiece.

What happened to the Afghan timber worker after a 2005 battle was made into a book and feature film.

What started as a DVD-mailing service has changed the way we watch TV. Now Netflix has to do it again. (And again. And again.)

The Libyan Investment Authority was brand new, staffed by people who barely understood finance and had billions to invest. Goldman Sachs saw a whale. Now the Libyans want their money back.

The house at 114 Lake Avenue in Bristol, CT that kept calling Aaron Hernandez, a NFL star by 20, back to “a volatile underworld of guns, drugs, and violence.”

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

For years, Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known as General Butt Naked, was one of Liberia’s most feared warlords. Then he became a pastor. Today he visits the families of his victims to seek forgiveness for his sins.

How doctors tried, and failed, to save President Kennedy.