In the 1980s, psychiatrist Joel Dreyer was a fixture on Detroit’s WXYZ Channel 7. His commercials promoting his treatment center, InnerVisions, which he named after the Stevie Wonder album, sometimes ran up to five times a day. In one ad, Dreyer blocks a bartender from serving a mug of beer to a…

Max Martin, pictured at the 2015 Grammy Awards, has written nearly two dozen No. 1 songs, for performers including Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL TRAN / FILMMAGIC VIA GETTY Among the stranger aspects of recent pop music history is how so many of the biggest hits…

Photo: Mourners at Gregory Robinson's funeral Author of There Are No Children Here , The Other Side of the River and Never a City So Real , Alex Kotlowitz produced The Interrupters with filmmaker Steve James, and his May 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Blocking the Transmission of Violence”…

Why are there so many cover versions of hit songs on Spotify , YouTube, and other streaming music services? It’s not just because of searches and the artistic equivalent of SEO , but because there is an economic engine to support them: Every time one of Scofield’s songs is downloaded on iTunes, she…

The Heirs A three-way, mostly civilized family contest to become the next publisher of From left: Sam Dolnick, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, and David Perpich. Paintings by Roberto Parada The issue of succession is a difficult matter not just for family-run businesses but for the families that run them.…

Born in El Paso, She Made Herself in Juárez E n route last year from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, once the most dangerous city on earth, Claudia Delfin crossed the border in fear over what she’d find on the other side, but the real trouble was in coming back. After spending a few jittery hours in…

“Information has always been currency,” says Shane, who insists on sharing only his first name. He’s an assistant to a television director. Hollywood, where Shane works, is like any other industry town—built on professional connections, on who you know as much as what you know. These days, that…

By the time anyone noticed that he hadn’t moved in at least five hours, the man on Somerton Beach must have started giving off fumes. It was about 6:30 a.m. on December 1, 1948, at the beginning of the Australian summer, and he did not look like the kind of man to sleep in the sand. He was in his…

Madeleine Fullard and Eugene de Kock.Photograph: Marc Shoul for The Guardian/Leon Botha/Gallo Images/Getty Images I n November 2014, on a vast game farm on the South Africa-Botswana border, a yellow excavator annihilated an overgrown plot set by a river. A pale blonde woman – slathered in sunscreen,…

When VNYL launched its Kickstarter campaign on December 22, 2014, the goal was to obtain $10,000 in funding. When the campaign ended 17 days later, on January 9, 2015, the project’s organizers had nearly quadrupled that goal, amassing $36,000 total. That money came in part thanks to countless news…

Long before the autopsy, London police could guess what killed Yuri Gadyukin. When they pulled his body from the river beneath the Hammersmith Bridge on July 26, 1960, they saw a bullet-sized hole that had ripped apart his skull. Authorities had been searching for the Russian director for weeks. By…

The Doublespeak of Parenting and the Double Blade of Ambition in Silicon Valley I volunteer at my son’s school in Menlo Park, which means once a month I read stories and talk about feelings with overachieving sixth graders. My son’s not in the class I visit, because I’m here, with Project…

I need to tell you something terrifying. If someone threatens to murder you on the Internet, the odds are all but certain that law enforcement will do nothing. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how serious the threats are. Help is not coming. I should know, I’ve had 49 death threats…

There was a drug deal going down that night in rural Michigan. It was September 4, 1990, just after sunset in the town of Owosso, population 16,360. There, about 90 miles northwest of Detroit, the Shiawassee River meanders past a hamlet of low-rent, brick apartment buildings. Inside one of them, a…

D amon Albarn was a strawberry picker. Long before he was the face of Blur — the iconic English band that have just released their first new studio album in 12 years, The Magic Whip , to some of the best reviews of their career — Albarn worked in the fields of his hometown of Colchester. Picking…

The trolley problem is an ethical and psychological thought experiment. In its most basic formulation, you're the driver of a runaway trolley about to hit and certainly kill five people on the track ahead, but you have the option of switching to a second track at the last minute, killing only a…

When you are a registered sex offender in America, you lose the right to choose where you want to live. By law. Your backstory doesn't matter. Nor does the nature of your crime or your excuse. You are exiled from society, and only a few places will welcome you. Like this place in South Florida. The…

The skin did not come off like a sweater, as I’d been told it would. I’d looked at how to do it in the classic Joy of Cooking , figuring the directions for squirrel couldn’t be much different from rabbit: hook it through the heels, yank the skin down to its paws. I didn’t have a hook, but even the…

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on…

The Russian president stunned Obama when he proposed Steven Seagal as an intermediary between Washington and Moscow. BuzzFeed News' Max Seddon and Rosie Gray tell the extraordinary story of the faded action star's dalliances with the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin knew his relationship with the United…

Dell Glover manufactured CDs for a living, but he began to wonder: if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD? Photograph by Jehad Nga One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to…

I n September 1992, I published my third book of photographs, “Immediate Family.” The book contained 60 photographs from a decade-­long series of more than 200 pictures of my children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, who were about 6, 4 and 1 when I started the project. The photographs show them going…

Of all the searing appraisals attributed to Steve Albini — musician (Shellac, Big Black), recording engineer (Nirvana, The Breeders, PJ Harvey, the list goes on forever), owner of Chicago’s Electrical Audio studio, thrower of truth bombs , notoriously fair dude — the one that sticks with me the most…

Sections Find Washington's Best... Apartment Rentals DC Travel Guide Dentists Doctors Financial Advisers Health Experts Home Resources Industry Leaders Lawyers Pet Care Private Schools Real Estate Agents Restaurants Retirement Communities Wedding Vendors More Subscribe Manage My Subscription Digital…

Bubble, My Ass: Some Unicorns Might Be Overvalued, But All Dinosaurs Gonna Die. Summary : pundits argue billion-dollar startups are overvalued, but few realize why public company valuations might also be too expensive. Traditional P/E ratios of 15–20+ are likely too optimistic, relative to how long…

When I lived in India, people often told me, “Send your man.” Medical test ready for pick up? Send your man. Need some onions last minute from the grocer? Send your man. I had no man. But this I could not confess. Any self-respecting man, it seemed, had a man. Sometimes these men were called “boys.”…

Illustration: Daniel Haskett T he thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to deal with were the dead children. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. It was early 2014, Crimea had…

It seems handily coincidental that one week after we learned that Google survived an FTC anti-trust investigation without much consequence, the search company announced the hiring of a new CFO, this one plucked from Morgan Stanley. The finance industry, after all, is the pacesetter when it comes to…

Let us pause for a moment to recognize how much we as a society owe to Leonardo DiCaprio. I myself became aware of DiCaprio in the glory days of the 1990s, when he ushered “ I’m the king of the world! ” into our shared vocabulary—his earliest, and perhaps greatest, social service. Back then, our…

David Brooks asks: what does life look like when you stop focusing so much on resume building and external achievement and spend more time working on your morality and inner character ? It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé…

John Barrymore, left, joked that “tribal gods” might “wreak vengeance on the thief.” Courtesy Bill Nelson The predominant natives of southeastern Alaska are the Tlingit—the People of the Tides. They are believed to have settled the Panhandle and the Alexander Archipelago more than ten thousand years…

1. An Investor's Guide to Hardware Startups. Super good, and long... one bit I'll pick out: Production cycles take time, usually 8-12 weeks. And if a company runs out of stock in between two batches, it can’t ship, so it can’t sell. The only way around it is to increase batch size. So instead of…

Illustrations by Skip Sterling H e’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go…

The condition of being unseen is a fantasy of power, and a metaphor for powerlessness. Illustration by Simon Prades It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything. One characteristic spell, recorded by the…

LONDON — The past few months have been full of change at The Economist. In January, Zanny Minton Beddoes was appointed the magazine’s new editor after her predecessor, John Micklethwait , left for Bloomberg. In November, The Economist launched Espresso , a daily news digest delivered via email or a…

Nine o'clock one Monday night, Azealia Banks is demanding a rolling pin. The 23-year-old rapper-singer-controversy magnet wants to show off her cooking skills, so she has decided to make her grandmother's chicken and dumpling soup from scratch. She chooses a ritzy midtown Airbnb space for this…

At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of…

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel Therese Mitchell/Estate of Joseph Mitchell Joseph Mitchell in Lower Manhattan, near the old Fulton Fish Market; photograph by his wife, Therese Mitchell In 1942 The New Yorker published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of a homeless man in…

Who am I IRL (in real life)? Male, white, bespectacled, Oxford shirt, mid-20s, organ donor. But in another, truer sense, this is also me: — Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) February 11, 2014 And this: What is “me irl”? It’s tough to define, but I’m sure you’re getting the hang of it. It’s not an ugly,…

On a sunny Saturday morning in May 2011, Brittany Quinn was optimistic. Sure, the night before, her ex had threatened to kill her. But his roommate at the time described Jason Eisenberg as the kind of guy who’d threaten to burn down your house if you cut him off in traffic. It was all bluster. …