On what you do when you can do whatever what you want.

A review/interview/profile:

Let's settle on the bald facts: Eminem has secured his place in the rap pantheon.

When they met, he was 45 and she was 17. In her 14 years as his mistress, she appeared in countless paintings, including Guernica.

It’s like when they fucking show—I know nothing about plays and shit, but sometimes they’ll show a play on TV, and it’s fucking shit, because you’re like, “What the fuck, am I supposed to think that’s a moon?” Like it’s a cardboard moon or some shit.

On Chuck Lorre, creator of the #1 (Two and a Half Men) and #2 comedy on American television, former cruise ship guitarist, composer of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, and recently antagonist of Charlie Sheen.

The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.

She is an unknown struggling writer. Her boyfriend is Jonathan Franzen.

After a final film, Kevin Smith is going to retire to a life of podcasting and speaking tours. Or so he says.

On Christian Marclay’s film The Clock.

A profile of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Text from the books and Foster Wallace’s corresponding annotations:

Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine?

On David Milch; Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush, literature professor, longtime junkie, creator of NYPD Blue, Deadwood (which was in production when this profile was written), and the forthcoming racetrack-set HBO series Luck.

A decade later, on the then twenty-three-year-old Van Morrison’s 1968 album Astral Weeks.

On David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and his legacy.

Reposted after it was pulled by The Atlantic:
How the little known $50/bottle champagne Antique Gold became the $300/bottle Armand de Brignac that Jay-Z “happened upon in a wine shop” and then featured in a video.

How Dennis from Head of the Class grew up to be the Aaron Sorkin of tween television.

A profile of a pre-30 Rock Tina Fey.

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.

Immigrant farmers are flocking to the poultry industry – only to become 21st-century sharecroppers for companies like Tyson.

On Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

The swinging life and boozy death of the original ladies man, and the story of “the coroner that tampered with his cold, lifeless venereal warts.”

On the many lives and careers of Owsley Stanley (1935-2011), chemist, sound design innovator, and outback jeweler, whose name appears in the OED as a synonym for “a particularly pure form of LSD.”