The artist discusses her latest record, Biophilia, science and music education. 

Up until she developed a vocal-cord nodule a few years ago, Björk made a point of not investigating how that instrument worked. “With arrangements and lyrics,” she says, squinting over her coffee, “I work more with the left side of my brain. But my voice has always been very right brain. I didn’t try to analyze it at all. I didn’t even know until I started all this voice work, two years ago, what my range was. I didn’t want to let the academic side into that—I worried the mystery would go.”

"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."

PLAYBOY: Is it possible you set a lower value on privacy than most people do?

DENTON: I don't think people give a fuck, actually.

Just days after suffering a concussion, a 17-year-old fullback hangs himself. Inside his family’s journey to learn if a brain injury is to blame.

At Nancy Reagan’s memorial, Hillary Clinton praised her fellow former first lady for “starting a national conversation” about AIDS. That is not how everyone remembers it.

The private grief of Samaria Rice, twenty months after her son Tamir was killed.

In 1983, I wrote an article about sex and disabled people. In interviewing sexually active men and women, I felt removed, as though I were an anthropologist interviewing headhunters while endeavoring to maintain the value-neutral stance of a social scientist. Being disabled myself, but also being a virgin, I envied these people ferociously

“Jeffrey Levitt stole and misappropriated a grand total of fourteen million, six hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents. He stole all that. It was the largest single white-collar crime in Maryland history, almost bringing down the state’s entire savings and loan industry.” And it still wasn’t enough.

The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.

Being off the grid suits Kurt Vile just fine. Sitting on the wraparound porch in jeans and a green T-shirt he got at the Ramones Museum in Berlin, unruly curls falling well below his shoulders, the 38-year-old Philadelphia singer-guitarist squirts several drops of a tincture labeled “Calm Mind” into a plastic water bottle and gives it a thorough swish. “Ayurvedic herbs,” he explains after gulping down his concoction. “It’s like nature’s Xanax.” He doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

To understand why a 64-year-old man would try and break the land speed record by traveling hundreds of miles per hour, you need to know a little something about his family.

A dispatch from Donetsk.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

The controversial history of WI-38, a cell strain created from an aborted fetus “that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers.”

A small-town coffeeshop owner led a double life as a blogger and podcaster on the topic of “pickup artistry.” Then his identity, and his intimate writings about his experiences with 46 local women, was made public.

“After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.”

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

A former prostitute and pregnant at 14, Lillie was a foster child looking for a home. A nurse and already a mother of 5, Amy wanted to help. Then Lillie and her newborn moved in.

A visit to Tokyo’s first co-sleeping cafe, where one can pay a set fee to sleep next to a woman in 20 minute increments, though spooning, being patted on the head, and a change of pajamas are extra.

Thirteen years ago, Chris Velten disappeared while retracing the travels of explorer Mungo Park in Africa. He hadn’t been heard from at all — until he sent a friend request.

On creativity in the age of Trump.