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.

A profile of Mister Rogers.

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?

Frankie Manning was the greatest swing dancer alive. Then the world forgot about him.

A profile of Rei Kawakubo, an artist of few words who changed women’s fashion.

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

Searching for home at a cowboy poetry convention in Elko, Nevada.

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.”

“You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: ‘No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.’ And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.”