“When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.”
A 16-year-old journalist goes on tour with a band on top. The article that inspired Almost Famous.
A profile of Norman Lear, the producer behind All in the Family and The Jeffersons, who is still making TV at age 94.
Watching the jazz singer in New York.
Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer. "He is so much better than anyone,” William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of “The Democratic Forest,” the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. “Feel the pages of the books,” he said. “The ink is in relief. It is that thick.”
On a comic offering portrayals of secular Muslims that American audiences rarely see.
On the road with the comic after a bitter divorce.
Over the past 15 years, three people have attempted to restore the humor brand to its former glory. What happened instead was direct-to-video movies, lawsuits, crippling debt, and two prison sentences.
A profile of the grieving musician, who lost his teenage son 18 months ago.
"I’m not familiar with books on style. My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke—just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time. It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar."
Decades after giving up the dream for good, an art critic returns to the work he’d devoted his life to, then abandoned — but never really forgot.
The greatest writers of the nineteenth century were drawn to the North Pole. What did they hope to find there?
Life after the sugar sphinx.
On his twelfth appearance on Letterman, Bill Hicks killed. The network refused to air it.
A profile of book editor Nan Talese.
How Netflix and Amazon upended the movie business.
Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real.
On becoming a stepmom.
An essay on clothing in uncertain times.
The story of The Anarchist Cookbook and why its creator, William Powell, regrets writing the book.
Danny Rubin wrote the movie and then the musical 24 years later. What happens when one thing becomes your entire life?
A profile of Rei Kawakubo, an artist of few words who changed women’s fashion.
On the seminal songwriter, who died four years ago today, in his final days before succumbing to dipsomania.
The reclusive director comes out of his shell at 73.
On the photographer Catherine Opie who has “made a study of the freeways of Los Angeles, lesbian families, surfers, Tea Party gatherings, America’s national parks, the houses of Beverly Hills, teen-age football players, the personal effects of Elizabeth Taylor, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Boy Scouts, her friends, mini-malls, and tree stumps.”
