Fuzzy memories of a house overlooking the Sunset Strip that played host to a generation of comics—including Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, and Robin Williams—launching dozens of careers and about as many drug problems.

“What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life.”

The troubling final years of Mickey Rooney’s life.

He created the template for contemporary hit-making, made Ace of Base the biggest group in the world, and mentored the most successful songwriter since the Beatles. Why have you never heard of Denniz Pop? Excerpted from The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.

With three shows currently in production, Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and American Horror Story, is one of the few show runners whose name commands an audience.

Explaining a radical shift in the way some of New York’s best restaurants do business.

‘‘That’s something I don’t think I could ever do,’’ she said. ‘‘Send my only girl to another random country to live with people she’d just met. It had to be God that paralyzed Monica Fenty’s emotions so that she’d say, ‘Yes, go.’ To this day, I don’t know how that happened. But thank God it did.’’

The Hollywood backroom machinations that got the biopic to movie screens.

A moment of racism at Harvard leads the writer to consider Huckleberry Finn.

The men whose profitable (and self-serving) antics preserved what we know of the Brontë sisters.

Who we think we are in 2015.

On the sex lives of the castrati.

An oral history of Gucci Mane’s many rises and falls.

The producer of Big Star’s Third and piano player on ‘Wild Horses’ recounts a life of music in Memphis.

The adventures and controversies of the avant-garde poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who believes plagiarism is an art form.

Hanging out with the Atomic Bombshells in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Attending a meeting of the Continental Drift Club in Berlin.

Practicing photography in Switzerland.

Hemingway was in love with two women at once. He found the experience wrenching.

He had the mind of a scholar, but he always insisted he didn’t want to be one.

The battle between 1975’s biggest shows.

We think of the character as lithe and slim as the actors who’ve played him. But Shakespeare might not have intended him to be that way.

Talking to Lee Daniels about Empire, Hollywood, and survival.

“Over the years, it’s been hard to get male movie stars to be in a movie if a woman’s the lead, where a great, great movie star, a woman, will be in a movie where the man’s the lead. So there’s just not parity there, we’re not on equal footing.”

In which Eliot analyzes Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence.