The ‘Sex Cult’ That Preached Empowerment

How did a former television star and a self-help guru convince women to join an organization named Nxivm that’s now being accused of running a “sex-slave cult”? It turns out that “humans are highly programmable.”

Published: May 30, 2018
Length: 34 minutes (8,632 words)

The Passion of Nicki Minaj

Vanessa Grigoriadis meets the world’s biggest female rap superstar. (Love the ending to this one.)

Published: Oct 7, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,762 words)

Everybody Sucks

Vanessa Grigoriadis’s 2007 feature on Gawker Media, and “the rage of the creative underclass.”

Published: Oct 14, 2007
Length: 25 minutes (6,356 words)

Meet the College Women Who Are Starting a Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault

Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz is carrying a mattress everywhere with her until her alleged rapist is expelled. Sulkowicz and other activists are bringing new attention to how colleges are handling sexual assault cases.

Published: Sep 21, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,484 words)

Tempest In a Test Tube

Vanessa Grigoriadis on the complicated, high profile custody battle between actor Jason Patric and his ex-girlfriend Danielle Schreiber.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jul 15, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,727 words)

Karma Crash

[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement:

“Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!'”

Published: Apr 16, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,897 words)

An American Drug Lord in Acapulco

On a warm morning in May a few years ago, Edgar Valdez, a drug lord who goes by the nickname La Barbie, woke up in one of the houses he owned in the resort city of Acapulco. In the 1950s, this beautiful beach town was the premier haunt of American celebrities: Frank Sinatra used to prowl the hotel lounges, Elizabeth Taylor had her third of eight weddings here, and John F. Kennedy honeymooned on the coast with Jacqueline. The glamour started to fade in the 1980s, but the city remained a popular vacation destination until a few years ago, when the Mexican cartels transformed Acapulco from a seaside paradise into one of the most violent flash points of the drug war. As chief enforcer for the town’s most powerful cartel, Barbie drove the celebrities away for good and made tourists nervous about straying too far into Acapulco when their cruise ships pulled into port. He felt bad about it, a little, but that is the way of the world, he thought – eat or be eaten.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,507 words)

Bohemian Cove: Inside Malibu’s Hottest Trailer Park

In the 1990s, some of the trailers at Paradise Cove went for as little as $25,000, while trailers with an ocean view sold for up to $400,000. But in the housing boom of 2006, prices went up tenfold, much more than in the rest of Malibu, even though buying a trailer is a pretty sketchy real-estate deal. The owner of the park still controls the land, and you’re just buying the improvements—in other words, all you own is the trailer itself. But prices still rise with each resale: a 75-year-old woman who seldom changed out of her bathrobe sold her trailer for $750,000 to the ex-wife of a former Eagles guitarist in 2003, but she never moved in—she decided she wanted to live on a boat. She sold it for $975,000 to another flipper, who sold it to Mac Humphries, a retired Countrywide executive, and his wife, Jill, for $1.2 million. The Humphrieses put another $1 million into renovations.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Feb 15, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,883 words)

Growing Up Gaga

[Not single-page] The self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop star.

Published: Mar 28, 2010
Length: 28 minutes (7,095 words)

Remembrances of the Punk Prose Poetess

Patti Smith, along with her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, lived a particular New York dream–the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, superstardom–to the fullest. Now in a great new memoir, she tells it like it was.

Published: Jan 10, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,067 words)