Automattic

Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so […]

I don’t usually bother telling people I went to Michigan for a single semester anymore. There isn’t much point because I’m at the age where people don’t give a shit where you went to school. They just ask you that question as a way of passing the time. But I also don’t mention it much […]

Mavrik, the object of Trut’s attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, then hands him […]

“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “

The blue water is so clear you can count every reef, so still you can see the odd cloud reflected in it. Lucy and Jeff have agreed to offer a view from the sky of what wary developers wrought on the ground: shuttered private-island resorts and abandoned luxury hotels marring the landscape, suspended in time […]

In the end, of course, it wasn’t just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding […]

On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, he offered his hand […]

The John Edwards tale began, like so many National Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper’s Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worthless, just wackos […]

Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell […]

Untold thousands of practitioners have risked their licenses to use MDMA in underground clinical settings since 1985, when the drug was added to Schedule I (the Drug Enforcement Administration’s category for substances with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse). To these therapists, MDMA offers the opposite of party-hard escapism—instead, they see […]