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In the early ’90s, Mike Jeffries gave struggling retailer Abercrombie and Fitch new life by selling a specific kind of lifestyle to teenage shoppers who “wanted to belong.” Times have changed, and the retailer needs to as well: Until relatively recently, Abercrombie’s numerous press scandals followed a predictable pattern: a flood of petitions and angry […]

On Nov. 22, 1987, a Chicago television station was hacked, broadcasting a strange suited figure wearing a rubbery mask and sunglasses to viewers for a brief moment. The story behind the hack and the hunt to figure out who was behind it: In some corners of the Internet, the story of how Max Headroom infiltrated […]

Animal rights activists uncover the dark underbelly of factory farming: Carlson’s secretly recorded footage, compiled over more than a month, triggered a cruelty indictment and cost the dairy a major buyer. The takedown, in 2008, was Carlson’s first assignment. Hired out of college by Kroll Advisory Solutions to gather business data, he left to find […]

How North Texas became the production hub for Christian entertainment: And as North Texas grew, the region—with its affordable acreage to site large-scale production facilities and its mostly conservative and religious-minded population—proved attractive to faith-based entrepreneurs. It helped, too, that in the 1980s, a film- and television-production tradition was established here, with secular fare like […]

On the trial of Joseph Hall, who murdered his neo-Nazi father when he was 10 years old. (For more background on the story, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Feb. 2013 piece.) Did an atmosphere of hate drive Joseph to kill? Did his stepmother? Or was it his childish misreading of a TV show? Or a complicated amalgam […]

[NSFW] Tom Braden launched CNN’s political talk show Crossfire and inspired the father figure on the TV show Eight Is Enough. In the 1950s, Braden also launched a CIA mission to use modern art to fight communism: Braden’s operation was a success. One of the world’s most famous and influential painters, Gerhard Richter, would later […]

On the genius of Cal Worthington, the legendary Southern California car dealer and TV pitchman who died Sept. 8 at age 92: “Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through […]