All the Young Girls
“Being a new girl [in New York] is a lot to process. Your dopamine receptors are haywire from so much of what feels like the right kind of attention and you preen out of paranoia. Sometimes you tap-dance about books, music, movies, food and politics for complete strangers. For hours. You mind-meld with people you hope to never see again because they scare you a little. You get sick from the options and the sleep deprivation and the vodka. Your friends from home tell you you’ve changed and you’re convinced that envy’s poisoned their flabby, docile minds. If you’re lucky, you snap out of it.”
Long Live the Web
The Web as we know it is being threatened in different ways. Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.
$#!% Joe Biden Says
“Look, no man or woman deserves one great love of their life, let alone two. And the amazing thing to me was that Jill, knowing how much I had adored Neilia… Uh, I once asked her, I said, ‘How could you marry me, knowing how much…?’ She said, ‘Any man who can love greatly once can do it twice.’ Now, a man wouldn’t say that! At least I wouldn’t have said that, probably. I’d have been jealous, man.”
Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle
How a high-fat diet is saving the author’s 9-year-old son, who once had as many as 130 seizures per day. “In an average week, Sam consumes a quart and a third of heavy cream, nearly a stick and a half of butter, 13 teaspoons of coconut oil, 20 slices of bacon and 9 eggs. Sam’s diet is just shy of 90 percent fat.”
The Torch Singer
Patti Smith is fifty-five, but she doesn’t look much different than she did in 1975, when her friend Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her for the cover of “Horses.” The Mapplethorpe photograph, which was shot in black-and-white—unusual for the time—is one of the most recognizable images in the iconography of rock and roll. Smith is standing against a white wall. Her dark hair, which grazes the base of her neck, is thick and wild, and she stares insolently at the camera. She wears a white shirt and has tossed a black jacket over her left shoulder in an homage to Frank Sinatra’s boulevardier poses. She looks arrogant, androgynous, and fragile.
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 3, 1992: Seattle and Pearl Jam
The perils of fame in grunge-era Seattle, and the trouble with avoiding it. “Still, the video for ‘Even Flow’ succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon.”
The Future of Advertising
In the ad business, the relatively good life of 2007 is as remote as the whiskey highs of 1962. “Here we go again,” moans Andy Nibley, the former CEO of ad agency Marsteller who, over the past decade, has also been the CEO of the digital arms of both Reuters and Universal Music. “First the news business, then the music business, then advertising. Is there any industry I get involved in that doesn’t get destroyed by digital technology?”
The Palin Network
His voice dripping with exasperation, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said to me one July afternoon in his office: “If I would have told you that I could open up a Facebook account or a Twitter account, simply post quotes, and have the White House asked about those, and to have the entire White House press corps focused on your quote of the day on Facebook — that’s Sarah Palin. She tweets one thing, and all of a sudden you’ve got a room full of people that want to know. …”
A Cocktail Party In The Street: Interview with TGI Friday’s Founder Alan Stillman
In 1965, Alan Stillman was a young man living in Manhattan, who, in his own words, was “looking to meet girls.” The bar restaurant he founded, T.G.I. Friday’s, began life as a public cocktail party — the first neighborhood joint to welcome both men and women alike, with the express motive to unite the two. Forty-five years later, Stillman’s singles’ bar in the Upper East Side has metamorphosed almost beyond recognition, spawning a landscape of casual dining franchises that redefined the American idea of the restaurant.
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 4, 1993: Chicago
After one of the headiest years in Chicago rock history—a time when the city usurped Seattle as the new alt-rock hotspot, thanks to Smashing Pumpkins going platinum with the colossal guitar symphony “Siamese Dream,” and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill releasing the critically acclaimed and demonstrably cool “Exile In Guyville” and “Saturation”—local music critic Bill Wyman stated an opinion that seems obvious now, but ended up being quite the shit-stirrer when he wrote it.
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