We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Las Vegas is both stranger and more normal than you might imagine, and for some reason, people don’t think anyone lives there.

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”

A profile of the internet’s poet, Patricia Lockwood.

A digressive consideration of the popular new show.

Tracking the circuitous fall of a Chinese political star.

On the murder of Jam Master Jay.

A profile of Mark Zuckerberg, savvy CEO.

Visiting a semi-secret LGBTQ commune in the middle of Tennessee.

Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls.

On motherhood, writing, and the death of a friend.

On the past, present, and future of gossip.

A profile of the rapper and activist.

The privately funded effort in danger of falling down.

Adventures at a gathering of furries.

A profile of Erykah Badu.

A profile of MF Doom.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

LGBTQI groups found rare freedoms online, but this year, many were shut by censors. It feels like slowly being sanded down, said one member.

The case against agriculture.

The story of a massacre in El Salvador.

Behind the doors of Centaurus, Rio’s most infamous brothel.

On the business of Muzak.

On the decline of nature, and our wonder at it.

The story of freelance journalist Anna Therese Day.