Horror-rap’s annual festival draws thousands of clown-makeup wearing Juggalos - devotees of Insane Clown Posse - for a weekend devoted to spraying Faygo soda, rioting, and discussions of the occult.

Lessons learned while temping at an Amsterdam coffee shop.

When Bob Dylan met Allen Ginsberg; a chapter from Sean Wilentz’s forthcoming Bob Dylan in America.

Soap operas, enrollment in multiple graduate programs at once, student films alongside Hollywood blockbusters. Is James Franco’s entire career a piece of performance art?

An interview with Sandy Koufax on “the management of excellence.”

Inside Rebecca West’s vast Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an eerily timeless travelogue of the Balkans written on the eve of WWI.

A firsthand account of prison’s dysfunctional relationships. The writer wasn’t able to gain access through official channels, so he completed guard training and took a job as a Sing Sing corrections officer.

A new Egyptian TV channel called 4Shbab—“for youth” in Arabic—aims to get young people interested in Islam through music videos and reality shows.

The shooting death of the last wild Passenger Pigeon, atomic energy, mastodon watering holes, and other footnotes in Ohio history.

Tony Judt on sex, the academy, and dating a graduate student while chairing NYU’s History Department.

How Juarez became the murder capital of the world.

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

An excerpt from a new biography explores the trio of tragedies that struck Dahl’s family just as his career was taking off.

Tony Judt on his own amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the experience of being “left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

A Pynchon conference in Lublin, Poland may say more about the men (yes, only men) who attend Thomas Pynchon conferences than the works of the reclusive author.

In “Operation Mincemeat” a vagrant’s corpse, raided from a London morgue, washed up on a beach in Spain, setting in motion an elaborate piece of espionage that fooled Nazi intelligence. Or did it?

Brian Hickey, a journalist who was induced into a coma after being left for dead following a hit and run accident, reports the story of his recovery.

Evidence of a decades-old hotel trist with a teenage intern costs a beloved Chicago columnist his job - and his identity.

Pat Robertson was 29 years old, possessionless, and living in a Bed-Stuy brownstone when he announced that God had told him to buy a fledgling TV station in Virginia. Here’s what happened next.

The forgotten life of Eva Tanguay, perhaps America’s first rock star.

David Sedaris on smoking and quitting.

The mother of a child born with a deformed brain responds, heartbreakingly, to an academic study claiming that people are happier without kids.

An interview with Lawrence Schiller, himself one of the great interviewers of his time, whose research fueled Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

What the great romantic novels of history can tell us about “seduction theory” and the cult of the pickup artist.

Vignettes of the residents of South Elliot Place.