When Hollywood writers went on strike in late 2007, a curious thing happened. The very reason for the strike—studio producers’ unwillingness to upgrade the pay scale for digital content—led to one of the major sea changes in recent memory. With the writers’ union refusing to write for TV and film,…

Tim Rogers/ Fusion MEDELLIN, Colombia— I hate shopping. Especially for clothes. So when the first lady of the adult webcam industry invited me to tag along on a shopping trip to buy clothes with two of her top models, I immediately said yes. Shirely Lara isn't a typical porn executive. As the…

I was born in 1980, so am among perhaps the last generation of American males who remember sneaking a peak at a Playboy. The women featured were beautiful and they showed a lot, but not everything. Playboy never revealed the sexual act. I can only imagine how many hours of sex the average male today…

I try not to pick at my lip, a habit from my childhood that re-appears when I am deeply rattled. The host calls my name. I trudge to the stage, like a child called in from the yard for supper. My mouth is dry. The 14 jokes on the page seem impossibly stupid in the bright light. I clear my throat.…

Keyboard Geniuses is our weekly glance at a few intriguing, witty, or otherwise notable posts from the Gameological discussion threads. Comments have been excerpted and edited here for grammar, length, and/or clarity. You can follow the links to see the full threads. School Days This week, we kicked…

John Colapinto Photo: Madison McGaw/BFA.com John Colapinto is a true renegade . In a sea of politically correct novels written by prudish women and castrated men, he had the courage to write Undone , a novel about a man who has a fetish for teenage girls. Getting his novel published wasn’t easy.…

Steve Miller‘s gripes against the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — for which the rocker was inducted Friday night — extended past the podium into the backstage area later that night. “The whole process is unpleasant,” Miller told reporters. “The whole process needs to be changed from the top to the…

This is the first in a series profiling some of Vancouver’s best independent bookstores and the book sellers who keep them up and running. The Paper Hound bookstore is snuggled in the bottom of a building that was once a Victorian hotel at 344 West Pender Street. You’ll know it by the sign featuring…

Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball 1. In the course of his twenty-eight years in politics and twenty more in active retirement, Richard M. Nixon uttered a great many…

“Boyhood” was filmed over twelve years; in the course of the nearly three-hour feature, the actors age along with their characters. Photograph by Dan Winters To get to the place where Richard Linklater was shooting his new film, you had to travel a short distance that seemed far: past the Barton…

Richard Linklater’s new movie is set at a Texas college. At his best, he doesn’t really direct a film so much as host it. Illustration by Mark Todd If you can’t think of a good way to kick off your movie, how about this? Take a handsome young buck, put him at the wheel of an Oldsmobile coupe, and…

It would be a small wedding. Nothing gaudy or over-the-top. Maybe we'd even elope. Admittedly, we'd only been texting for 24 hours, but I was sure this was The One. Advertisement It began at a celeb-studded non-event in Beverly Hills the evening before with a few other journalist friends. All pomp…

Dylan Howard was the volatile actor's confidant until the National Enquirer editor began investigating rumors that Sheen was HIV positive. Then it was war. And that’s a story, told here for the first time, almost too crazy to believe. This story first appeared in the April 22 issue of The Hollywood…

Louis C.K.’s “Horace and Pete” presented itself as an experiment, an exercise in optimism even in its darkest notes. Still from “Horace and Pete” The sorrowful bit of music that plays at the end of each “Horace and Pete” episode, written for the Web series by Paul Simon, begins with a little dark…

You’d expect Ken Burns to be a pretty serious guy, but when Indiewire sat down with him at the TCA Winter Press Tour, he said that he loves it when people spoof his signature filmmaking style. “I get it,” he said. “I love it. I love that it pokes fun at seriousness as well as all that stuff you…

On the eve of a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, the film's stars, director and screenwriter recount the tension and tumult (trivia: Harvey Keitel’s pimp was originally written as black; producers "had to hire a gang to protect us from other gangs") that preceded a movie masterpiece. A…

Credit: YTV During the great narrative revival of the mid 2010s, you can watch a movie in which Jack Black plays a kids’ horror writer named R.L. Stine who literally hunts down and pacifies creatures the real R.L. Stine created in the ‘90s. You can watch a thoroughly humiliated Macy Gray sing a duet…

A terrorist hoping to buy an antiaircraft weapon in recent years needed to look no further than Facebook, which has been hosting sprawling online arms bazaars, offering weapons ranging from handguns and grenades to heavy machine guns and guided missiles. The Facebook posts suggest evidence of…

Wealthsimple is a whole new kind of investing service. This is the latest installment of our recurring series “ Money Diaries ,” where we ask interesting people to open up about the role money has played in their lives. Spike Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. My first…

Whether or not our government wants to admit the legitimacy of sex work as an industry, there are thousands of women every day in Canada who run escorting like any other business. In Montreal, one person who is an integral part of this industry is a woman who goes by DannyGirl . Over the past…

It would be unfair to say that it was a big weekend for the gang of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” because, well… it wasn’t just big . If anything, it was a massive celebration for the show, whose historic double season renewal was announced on the same day the cast and creators were due to…

A life-size robot named "Mark 1," built by product and graphic designer Ricky Ma, 42, is seen in Hong Kong. The eyes of the robot include face and color tracking functions. Bobby Yip/REUTERS As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course)…

The text message says to show up at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel at 11 a.m. on a Monday. But through some combination of traffic and my own chronic lateness, I find myself rushing into the lobby at 12 minutes after, aware that it’s not a good look to be late for work, my first day on a new…

Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw,…

As our relationship with photography shifts, will desktop-based photo-editing programs like the Google Nik Collection go the way of the film camera? Photograph by Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP “Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On…

How the World’s Largest Travel Monopoly Ultimately Hurts Travelers & Small Businesses It’s no secret that most travelers will eventually end up on TripAdvisor when planning their vacation. It has become the Google of the travel world, where people go for honest, unbiased reviews of hotels,…

Part I July 25, 2015 Kazan, Russia T he Russian, pale and sour, ballet-walks heel-toe, heel-toe onto the pool deck in his bathing suit, which is designed to look like a communist-era military uniform. It consists of shorts, a real fold-down collar, actual epaulets and a black cross-body strap for…

On February 27th, Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders among African-American voters by 52 points. By March 26th, she led Sanders among African-Americans by just nine points. And today, Public Policy Polling, a widely respected polling organization, released a poll showing that Sanders leads Clinton…

It’s time to go back to where we began: not only that Donald Trump will lose the Republican presidential nomination, but also that he could be so weakened by the end of the primaries that his party will not even have to worry about choosing someone else. I feel your skepticism. Hasn’t Trump so far…

NOT long ago, I listened to a couple of radio talk-show hosts taking calls about a study showing that, despite airlines’ best sterilization efforts, potentially deadly bacteria thrived on plane surfaces. Tray tables, armrests, window shades, the kangaroo-pouch depths of a seat pocket — the very few…

Melinda Tankard Reist as published on ABC Religion and Ethics "[I want] better education regarding sex for both boys and girls [and] information about pornography, and the way it influences harmful sexual practices." These are the words of Lucy, aged 15, one of 600 young Australian women and girls…

WASHINGTON — In Douglas Laux’s final days as a C.I.A. officer, the futility of his mission prompted him to quote George Orwell to his boss. Mr. Laux had spent months in 2012 working with various Middle Eastern nations that were trying to ship arms to Syria to help disparate rebel groups there. But…

3:05 am ET By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin 3:05 am ET By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin Donald J. Trump was in Washington for a meeting at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday. Susan Walsh/Associated Press Updated, 8:12 a.m. | Outwardly, Donald J. Trump called it a…

Some unicorns are still galloping. Slack, the popular workplace collaboration start-up , said it had raised $200 million in new venture financing on Friday, valuing the privately held company at $3.6 billion. Slack is part of a group of prominent start-ups known as “unicorns,” private companies…

The Ben Affleck of the late ‘90s was a charm machine: goofy, self-effacing, and deep in a highly public bromance with the equally winning Matt Damon. Within five years, he was a punchline. It took a decade for his career to recover. Today, he's once again at war with his image. So what's Affleck so…

WireImage Before she became one of the most vocal advocates in the ongoing push for diversity in Hollywood, Lexi Alexander was a young, mixed-race immigrant born to a German mother and a Palestinian father. After coming to the U.S. at the age of 19, she made a name for herself on the competitive…

Netflix/Marvel Warning: minor spoilers. The new season of Netflix’s Daredevil opens with the Punisher storming through a crowded hospital, wielding a fully-loaded shotgun, and blasting holes through walls as he chases after a mobster. When his target escapes in a getaway car, he moves to the roof…

Over the past few days, Donald Trump has said and done things that have raised more doubts about his temperament, judgment, and command of policy issues. Photograph by Al Drago / CQ Roll Call / Getty If Donald Trump were a normal political candidate, he would be in serious trouble at the moment.…

Suburban dirtballs of the 1980s are a lost culture, worthy of academic study, that disappeared abruptly, leaving mysterious artifacts for future generations to work over. Think of them as, say, the ancient Mayans, only with mullets. This, at least, is the judgment of the University of Maryland,…