“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

“It takes this huge amount of will and energy for anything to happen to you.”

Six women tell their stories.

“By asking very simple questions, people have said the most astonishing things to me.”

“I’ve got these boxes of ideas and I’m starting to go through them to see if there’s any gold. “

Three days in Wyoming as the hip-hop firebrand tends to his scars.

The icon opens up about her mistakes, her family, and her journey to become a better person.

“There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend.”

An interview with Cobain a few months after the release of In Utero.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg on coming out as trans.

An interview with Maurice Sendak.

Deep Throat, unmasked.

“I always walk away from an interview — no matter how well it went — knowing that there’s so much that I don’t know about that person.”

An interview with the activist.

Outkast’s Andre Benjamin at 42.

You gotta understand, I’ve only written one check in my life. When I was 17, they still had checkbooks, and my mom taught me how to write a check and do my balance. So I had one check on my balance, and then OutKast took off. I have not paid a bill since. People ask, What does it feel like? As humans, we want attention. We want to be validated. At the same time, it’s strange attention, and a lot of it. If you have an excess of anything, it becomes strange.

An interview with the mind behind Star Trek.

An 11-hour conversation about “well, just about everything that’s ever been funny.”

The ’90s icon and Nine Inch Nails frontman talks about listening to music, his own and others, in 2017.

"If I had been a straight-A student my whole life and had rapped about Jesus coming back to save us all, I wouldn’t get no media. The motherfuckers wouldn’t give a fuck about me. But since I’m telling the truth, and been through what I’m stressing and know what I’m talking about, I’m a threat."

“‘Make America Great Again’ means ‘Make America White Again.’ So now you have this other explosion of people who want to feel above something, better than something. And who is that? That’s me.”

"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."

An interview with Dylan, 75, on the power of recording standards.

“Do you think you’re talking to a normal person here?”

An interview with Joan Didion.

“We have a lot in common. We go to the same shrink.”