Medium

After The Beach Boys’ domestic album sales started suffering in the late 1960s and their squeaky clean surfer image fell out of favor, they co-wrote a song that helped them connect with America’s shaggy, drug-taking counterculture and regain their popularity. This is the story of that song, and the story of American pop music after the Summer of Love.

Kim France—founding editor of Lucky magazine, and one-time writer for Sassy—on feeling like an outsider among fancier editors at Conde Nast, and dreading the annual company luncheon at The Four Seasons, especially when seated next to chairman Si Newhouse.

Former Lucky Magazine editor and Girls of a Certain Age blogger Kim France reflects on the miscalculation that her life would be perfect, and her marriage would work, if she lived in the perfect Brooklyn Brownstone.

Writer and performer Sara Benincasa writes a brilliant, biting, and hilarious response to the guy who wrote her asking, “Why did you gain so much weight?”

“When I was a child, I always half-suspected that America wasn’t real.” Laurie Penny goes back stage at both conventions, and sees American myth-making in action.

A meditation on grief, from the late comedian Harris Wittels’ sister.

An in-depth look at how publishers on the internet prepare for an explosion of traffic.

Tor Ekeland, unemployed and burned out from his job working at a corporate law firm, decided to defend Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer, a Jew-hating hacktivist also known as weev, and challenge a sweeping computer crime law.

Writer and musician Bob Stanley vividly recounts the rise and fall of Phil Spector and Joe Meek.

“This is what it means to never forget.” #Sept11