version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? By Oct 7, 2007 In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So…

By Uncategorized 4 years ago After stirring keynote speeches by Lewis Black and Marc Maron over the past couple of years, Patton Oswalt took to the stage adjacent to the Hyatt lounge on Thursday afternoon to deliver the third annual keynote for the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference in Montreal.…

"Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future." – Raoul Duke, Christmas Eve 1972 The following disconnected excerpts from Dr. Thompson's political book 'Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail' were selected more or less…

Before he angered customers by raising prices, before he became the butt of Saturday Night Live satire for his Qwikster schemes, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings alienated some of his key executives. Influential voices at the company departed just before Netflix embarked on a doomed attempt to spinoff DVD…

Lurie in 1984, in his Lounge Lizards heyday. Credit Photograph by Sylvia Plachy From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” and the…

On February 5, 2012, the quasi-maybe-sorta-sometimes-revolutionary pop star M.I.A. performed alongside Madonna at the Super Bowl half-time show. Despite the fact that M.I.A.’s music interrogates ideas about revolt, nationalism, and the distribution of wealth (“Pull up the people. / Pull up the…

My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was—old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College…

Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’ s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case…

Artist Todd White seemingly had it all. With a multi-million-dollar art brand, collectors and clients ranging from Sylvester Stallone to Coca-Cola, and a burgeoning reputation in art-mad Britain, his days as lead character designer of SpongeBob SquarePants were but a distant memory. But, as David…

(The Q&A below is the first in a two-part series looking at high-frequency trading. Click here to read the second part.) Mark Cuban is best-known for his success as a businessman and pro basketball owner . But in the past few years, he has also gained a reputation as one of the most prolific critics…

WASTE But Frankel, the original creator of Winamp and Gnutella, wasn't out of ideas. Unfortunately, his ideas all made AOL furious. Just as the RIAA was prepping lawsuits against Gnutella users , Frankel kept butting heads with AOL corporate headquarters in Dulles, Virginia—trying to get Nullsoft…

News & Culture My Father and Me: A Spy Story It was just a favor to dear old dad. But the next thing Nathan Nicholson knew, he was jet-setting around the world under cover and selling state secrets to the Russians. You know what they say: Like father, like spy On a Saturday morning in the summer of…

President Obama awaiting G8 leaders at Camp David last month. He has an ambitious agenda, which, at least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. Credit Photograph by Luke Sharrett / New York Times / Redux In November, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reëlected in a landslide victory…

Most Popular Jake Chessum version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? By There are worse spots to wait for Bill Murray than the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Sure, the place smells like piss and feels like a peep-show booth, but it's got the Jersey-rest-stop grand slam: a…

It’s always been Michael Bloomberg’s most fervent political conviction that he knows best how to address these problems. He has famously strong views on where people can smoke, what they should eat (and, last week, drink), how much companies can pollute, and how schools educate their students, and…

Oracle v Google JUDGE William Alsup knows how to play a bluff. Presiding in the Oracle v Google trial, where the search giant was accused of violating Oracle's copyrights and patents, he had instructed the jury to assume that mimicking work-alike functionality can violate copyright even where it…

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran ’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the…

Last summer, Turntable.fm set techie hearts pounding: Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, co-founders of a struggling start-up called Stickybits, had pulled an audacious pivot, scrapping their service and betting everything on online music, the most treacherous business on the Internet—and it worked.…

About $11 million of Robinson’s exit package was from her pension and retirement plan. Another roughly $7 million consisted of her yearly compensation and awards, and stock options she was entitled to after her years at the Times. But she also received a $4.5 million consulting contract, a kind of…

The Voice recruited new talent just by offering a place to publish, and it did not have to pay much. Illustration by Jules Feiffer. Credit FANTAGRAPHICS The first person known to have said, “The Village isn’t what it used to be” was the writer Floyd Dell. That was in 1916. Dell was from Illinois,…

Default Man Up, Bieber Justin Bieber is now 18 years old. Which means, technically, he's an adult. But the question remains: Is he a man? (If you just laughed, congratulations: You're mean.) GQ sent Drew Magary to spend one wild night with the Beeb in Los Angeles right after his big birthday, with…

When London threw its name into the hat for the 2012 Olympics, many had doubts. Not former sport minister Tessa Jowell. Interviewing Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others Jowell recruited to her cause, Michael Joseph Gross details the grueling, often farcical campaign that won the city its…

Pastafarianism in the military

Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures . You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla . All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly…

George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went. It was a historic…