The first time I met Little Richard, I had just gotten back from his hometown (and Otis Redding’s, and, more or less, James Brown’s) of Macon, Georgia. It was 1984, and I was working on my book Sweet Soul Music (which wouldn’t be published for a couple of years), while …
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Sunday marks Bono’s 60th birthday, and to celebrate the U2 singer has unveiled his “60 Songs That Saved My Life” playlist. “These are some of the songs that saved my life,’ Bono wrote of the playlist. “The ones I couldn’t have lived without… the ones that got me from there …
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The Rolling Stones have released the brand-new song “Living in a Ghost Town” to tide fans over until they’re able to reschedule the upcoming leg of their No Filter tour. It’s their first original composition since “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot” came out on their 2012 compilation album …
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After more than a decade working in the field of bioethics, I’ve gotten used to the blank stares on people’s faces when I tell them what I do. I usually follow up with a description like “I think through the ethical components of current or potential medical care or research …
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It’s a brisk December day in Houston, and Megan Thee Stallion is giving detailed notes on how, exactly, she wants her dancers to twerk. The beat to Yo Gotti’s “Pose” pulsates through White Oak Music Hall as the 25-year-old star prepares for a hometown show 24 hours from now, her …
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Michael Huttner has spent decades in the trenches of progressive politics. In the mid-2000s, he co-founded ProgressNow, a network of state-level liberal communications hubs that has 23 chapters and 4 million members and acts as a counterweight to right-wing think tanks and activist groups. In 2010, he organized one of …
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Kirk Douglas always comes out fighting. I use the present tense, because it’s damn near impossible to think of this paragon of golden-age Hollywood stardom any other way. Yes, his son Michael Douglas formally announced yesterday that his father had died at the Methuselah-level age of 103, but it’s still …
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When the Oscar-winning composing duo — and Nine Inch Nails bandmates — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross learned that the beloved comic book Watchmen was going to be expanded into a TV series, they wanted in. Reznor was already a fan of the graphic novel, but moreover he liked the …
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This month, Netflix hauls out the big guns: a claustrophobic nightmare from a legendary horror scribe, a quasi-revival of an era-defining TV hit, a teen drama set after the apocalypse (or is it an apocalypse drama with teens?) and a double shot of Paul Rudd. Also on deck: an eerie …
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The leaders of Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, and other tech giants filed into the Roosevelt Room at the White House. Opposite them was the top brass of the Obama administration, including President Obama himself. It was a few days before Christmas 2013. The tech execs had come to convince the …
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