February 2011
1 post
1 tag
The Geek Kings of Smut
After once being the best thing that ever happened to porn, the Internet is now wreaking havoc: destroying some fortunes, making bigger ones, and serving as a stimulus plan, in more ways than one.
By Benjamin Wallace
For one brief moment here at the 2011 Adult Video Awards in Las Vegas, America’s porn performers can forget about the Golden Decade of the Teen Wanker and remember when they...
January 2011
2 posts
Travis the Menace [New York, Jan. '11]
Travis the Menace
He was the most famous ape in America. But to really understand a chimp, you have to know his mother.
By Dan P. Lee
Published Jan 23, 2011
Travis holding Sandy’s grandson, Andrew. (Photo: Courtesy of Di Mare Pastry Shop)
Throughout her life, Sandy Herold had long, straight hair so black it almost looked wet. She wore it down below her shoulders, her bangs cut...
Interview: George Lois [Vice Magazine, Jan '11]
INTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO PORTRAITS BY TIMUR CIVAN
George Lois was one of the primary architects of the Creative Revolution in American advertising in the 1960s—yeah, yeah, like on Mad Me. He was a leading figure at the world’s first creative agency and cofounded its second. This was a time when “creative” was a way to describe someone who had original ideas and not, as theOxford American...
December 2010
1 post
The Last Resort [Guardian, 2003]
Decca Aitkenhead
The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2003
When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica’s Tranquility Bay - a ‘behaviour-modification centre’ which charges $40,000 a year to ‘cure’ them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years,...
November 2010
7 posts
An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange...
by Andy Greenberg
Forbes
December 2010
Admire him or revile him, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago. Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files...
Satan's Accountant (Portfolio)
by Claire Hoffman
May 2008
On the outskirts of Las Vegas, Warren Jeffs, the prophet and leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamist sect of Mormonism known as the F.L.D.S., barreled down Interstate 15 in a red Cadillac Escalade. Driving him was Isaac Jeffs, one of his dozen or so brothers. Naomi Jeffs—a beautiful 32-year-old blond with hair to her...
Barely Legal (Portfolio)
by Claire Hoffman
Oct 2008 (Portfolio)
It’s close to midnight, and Dov Charney, the 39-year-old founder of American Apparel, lies in his bed staring at a massive flat-screen TV. A pair of boat shoes and a white electric muscle massager are on the floor nearby. Behind him, a huge window is lit up with a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Inside his gated, marble, gold-encrusted mansion on a...
Sick on the inside (Harper's Magazine)
Correctional HMOs and the Coming Prison Plague
by Wil S. Hylton
August 2003
When David Hannah walked into a small office on the second floor of the Moberly Correctional Facility in Moberly, Missouri, last fall, carrying his belly like a hundred-pound sack of sand, the staff knew him well enough not to worry about what he might break or steal or soil in their private offices, which were normally...
James Frey’s Fiction Factory (New York Magazine)
The controversial author is hiring young writers to join him in a new publishing company. The goal is to produce the next Twilight. The contracts are brutal.
By Suzanne Mozes
Published Nov 12, 2010
Photo-illustration by Gluekit (Photo: Christopher Lane (Frey); Gluekit (body); Archive Holdings Inc./Getty Images (background); Getty Images (typists))
In February, James Frey was invited...
The Convict and the Congressman (Portfolio, 2007)
by Andrew Rice Oct 15 2007 How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?
On August 3, 2005, tech entrepreneur Vernon Jackson walked outside, into a warm and hazy Kentucky morning. No one watching his modest red brick home from afar—as someone...
Obscene Losses (Portfolio, 2007)
by Claire Hoffman
Oct 15 2007
DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse.
On Friday, May 18, Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment Group,...
October 2010
7 posts
Beauty and the Beast [The Observer, 2004]
She was the biggest pop star in the Balkans, he was a bank robber, gangster, politician, paramilitary leader and war criminal. ‘Ceca’ Raznatovic tells Adam Higginbotham about living with Arkan.
Adam Higginbotham The Observer Sunday 4 January 2004 It’s been nearly four years now, but the concierge at the Intercontinental Hotel doesn’t need to think about it for a...
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Himself
Tony Kushner is one of the last public intellectuals left standing in the theater—or America. Heavy is the head that wears that crown.
By Jesse Green
Published Oct 17, 2010
(Photo: Christian Weber)
Of the 100 or so books Tony Kushner lugged to Provincetown for a four-week holiday this summer, about the trashiest was The Oxford Book of Death. He gestured toward it on a bookshelf in the...
The (Chinese) Gangs of New York [Village Voice,...
by Mark Jacobson
First published in the Village Voice, January 31, 1977
Late last year, the young Chinese couple who ran the Szechuan D’Or restaurant on East 40th Street were murdered. The incident sparked fear that the crime which had riddled Chinatown was moving uptown. Police launched a citywide campaign to wipe it out. The crackdown played havoc with established vice in Chinatown....
Dispatches From the R. Kelly Trial [Slate]
By Josh Levin Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Day 1: Unveiling the “Shaggy Defense”
As R. Kelly’s child pornography trial is about to start, the judge’s media liaison gathers all of the reporters together to announce that we’ll be watching a sex tape in open court. He then delivers stern advice about doodling. “I am here to warn you,” says Terry...
The Last Ride of Jesse James Hollywood [LA...
Wanted for kidnapping and murder, a Valley Boy gangsta lives up to his name By Jesse Katz Share Los Angeles magazine, February 2002
The boy in the video is named Jesse James Hollywood. That is what his birth certificate says. He is close to 20 but could pass for 15. His hair is short and blond. His eyes are blue. He is nearly as small—five feet five, 140 pounds—as most of his friends were in...
1 tag
Confessions of a Car Salesman
Trapping the Lord of War: The Rise and Fall of...
by Spiegel Staff
10/6/2010
Viktor Bout, who has been dubbed the “lord of war” and the “merchant of death,” has had his fingers in many bloody conflicts over the years. The Russian arms dealer, who has been in a Thai prison since 2008, is now likely to be extradited to the United States. Will he reveal the names of his backers? By SPIEGEL Staff
Anyone who meets with...
September 2010
4 posts
The Graveyard [The Miami Herald]
by Lynne Duke
Miami Herald, The (FL)
Sunday, April 5, 1987
The tiny woman with purple nails sucks on the makeshift pipe. The smoldering rock glows and dims, and now she is holding her breath, gasping back the smoke as long as her lungs permit. She calls herself Awful Thang, because that’s what she is when she’s high. Another woman and a man with gold teeth sprawl on the...
The Gangster Prince of Liberia [Details]
How a twentysomething small-time hoodlum from Florida may have become the most notorious murderer in Africa
By Adam Higginbotham Details November 2007
It was dark out early that night, and clear. But for the deputies of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office who worked the late shift in Patrol Sector Three, there was little to distinguish the evening of February 25, 1994, from any other in the...
Bring It On Home [Vice]
The Southern Boys Behind Eastbound & Down Send Kenny Powers’s Ass to Mexico
Published October, 2010 BY HUNTER STEPHENSON
PHOTOS BY RICHARD KERN This colossal exposé on the long-awaited second season of Eastbound & Down is going to appear in our October Larfs Issue, but we wanted to give you the chance to look at it now because we thought you’d like that. Also the new season...
Inventing Facebook [NY Mag]
In Internet wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, TV wunderkind Aaron Sorkin may have found his perfect subject: the wunderkind genius jerk. But is The Social Network the scathing portrait of Zuckerberg that Facebook fears? You’ll be arguing about that for weeks.
By Mark Harris
Published Sep 17, 2010
From left, Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, and Andrew Garfield. (Photo: Jeff...
August 2010
6 posts
I Joined Three Cults Simultaneously [Vice...
Vice Magazine
by Thomas Morton
Published October, 2006
Vice made me join three cults for this issue: Adidam, the Moonies, and Aleph. Since Adidam tops the list of “controversial groups” at cult watchdog Rick Ross’s website, I figured it’d be the best place to start. Also, their whole deal is worshiping a guru from Long Island who now lives on Fiji and looks like a cross between Yoda...
In the Land of the Juggalos [Vice Magazine]
A Juggalo Is King
Published October, 2007
By Thomas Morton
Photos by Brad Troemel
“What is a Juggalo? A dead body / Well he ain’t really dead, but he ain’t like anybody that you’ve ever met before / He’ll eat Monopoly and shit out Connect Four.” –ICP, “What is a Juggalo?” With the possible exception of the Jews, no other group has eaten as big an amount of shit...
1 tag
Liebling in Paris [The New Yorker, 1944]
Excerpt from A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings (Library of America, 2008), pages 522–527.
Originally appeared in The New Yorker, September 9, 1944. Reprinted in Mollie and Other Pieces copyright © 1964, renewed 1992 by Norma Liebling Stonehill. Letter from Paris
September 1 (by wireless) For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where...
Who is the real JT Leroy? [New York Magazine]
A search for the true identity of a great literary hustler.
By Stephen Beachy
Published Oct 10, 2005
Laura Albert (a.k.a. Speedie or Emily Frasier), left, with JT LeRoy at an event he hosted at Deitch Projects last year. (Photo: Danielle Levitt)
In 2000, when JT LeRoy’s novel Sarah was published, I attended his first reading in San Francisco, where local writers read in place of the...
1 tag
Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night [New York...
“… The new generation takes few risks; it graduates, looks for a job, endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, it explodes …”
By Nik Cohn
*From the June 7, 1976 issue of New York Magazine.
Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I...
1 tag
The James Franco Project [New York Magazine]
Movie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher—he’s turned a Hollywood career into an elaborate piece of performance art. But does it mean anything? A critical investigation, with bathroom break.
By Sam Anderson
Published Jul 25, 2010
Illustration by Gluekit (Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
1. The Wink “Franco is here. And he is seriously good looking,...