“My mother kept scrapbooks of everything any of her children did all their lives, and among my scrapbooks are newspapers that I wrote on the typewriter at the age of six, The Hersey Family News, with ads offering my older brothers for various kinds of hard labor at very low wages.”

How Gary Gygax, a semi-employed shoe repairman, built and lost the Dungeons & Dragons empire.

“After listening to him since I was a kid and seeing him live for—gulp—nearly 40 years, I think I’m beginning to figure it out.”

A gardener in Newark, NJ tries to grow the world’s best peppers.

The CEO is 32. The CFO is 28. Their startup is the second-largest burger chain in the country.

Why the second Indiana Jones was so dark.

An ode to the Bee Gees' strange, successful career.

A profile of author William T. Vollmann.

“Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.”

Inside a high-profile Hollywood child custody battle.

A profile of “America’s most vulnerable comedian.”

The business of being Pitbull.

Untangling the legend of “Knausgaard-free days.”

“I come to America, I go to England, I go to France…nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure. … It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk—in their personal life.”

“Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.”

The memories of rock stars’ ex-lovers.

Three years after profiling him, the author checks in with the Bieber experiment.

How Brian Eno works.

The Maroon 5 singer discusses douchebaggery.

The postscript of a viral hit.

How Hafeez Contractor is creating an alternate India in the sky, where professionsals are “insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung their homeland.”

In Austin in 1973, politicos and hippies could get together and create violent, visionary horror films for $60,000. So they did. The story of how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got made.

“If I’m writing a thing based on something that happened, it often starts to become fun for me when I see there’s an opportunity to make myself look even more of a jerk than I am in real life.”

A profile of the photographer, who has been accused by several models of sexual abuse.

An interview with Peter Matthiessen.