On Mark Twain’s recently released memoir.

Jack Nicholson interviewed at 73.

On Sam Cooke, theme parties, and the importance of McDonald’s-related jingles when street performing.

On the language of hobos and the dictionaries it spawned.

J.D. Salinger on the beaches on D-Day, marching through concentration camps, and in liberated Paris.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

Searching for (and easily finding) Mark Augustus Landis, the man behind the “longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.”

When (temporary) cities swell; a short history of the Burning Man festival.

Here’s what I really want to do at 32: fuck a girl and then, as she’s sleeping in bed, make breakfast for her. So she’s like, “What? You gave me five vaginal orgasms last night, and you’re making me a spinach omelet? You are the shit!” So she says, “I love this guy.” I say, “I love this girl loving me.” And then we have a problem.

A profile of Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News.

A 2000 speech on the impossibility of all forms of exile, particularly literary.

On his 80th birthday; how Archie Leach, “the Bristol-born son of a part-Jewish suit presser,” became the greatest leading man of his generation.

On the late comedian Bill Hicks, just as a performance on Letterman is deemed unfit for network TV.

A profile of the director, written from the set of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

On Huck Finn, the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and the evolution of language and race in America.

“As we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money?”

On how 21st century culture shifts killed the nerd and what lies ahead.

On the evolution of Nigeria’s booming film industry, which produces 50 full-length features a week.

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

Walter Benjamin, mp3s, and what collecting says about us.

“Fiction writers are good people, usually. There’s a lot of pretenders, but I haven’t met a lot of sons of bitches.”

In 1926, at the age of 12, Barbara Follett published a critically acclaimed novel. Fourteen years later, she disappeared.

A profile of director Sofia Coppola.

The uneasy dance of the architecture critic, the big-name architect, the towering new building, and the city beneath it.

“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”