“Ebert: Sometimes we do really dislike each other.

Siskel: And sometimes we don’t.”

“The first time I was ever published in a book was 1997. It was because I found Roger Ebert’s email and asked him a question.”

An oral history of Siskel and Ebert.

A profile of the D.O.C., the rapper’s rapper, who ghostwrote for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

On the business of selling books.

On Aint It Cool News’ Harry Knowles, who built an influential empire on insider movie news while wheelchair-bound and at one point weighing over 500 pounds, then lost it all.

The author visits Franklin County, Mississippi, where, according to census data, there are zero same-sex couples.

The case for gay marriage.

A former Facebook executive critiques Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” movement.

How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

How the Brooklynization of culture killed regional music scenes.

How the author of Friday Night Lights spent more than half a million dollars over three years on “eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves.”

Life as a human cannonball.

An interview with the late writer.

Conspiracy theories, utopian fantasies, and cult involvement surrounding the international standard of musical tuning.

A visit to a Maine museum devoted to Bigfoot and other mythical creatures.

An asshole learns to sing.

The history of blue jeans, “America’s greatest contribution to the global closet.”

On Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, its uncanny knack for reflecting changes in Russian politics and culture, and the recent acid attack on its artistic director.

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

A son tries to make sense of his mother’s end.

On reading and writing fan fiction.

A profile of the late-night host.

The economics of being a young writer.

The diarist and photographer Peter Beard, known both for his series documenting a mass elephant starvation and for discovering the supermodel Iman on a Nairobi street, reflects on his life of “drugs, debt, and beautiful women” while recovering from being trampled by an elephant.