So many of the worst nightmares of parenting start with a phone call: a child out of arm’s reach, not in the house, not in her bed. Or, in this case, a text on a rainy night from my daughter Read More …

The last time I visited the Village Voice’s old, big newsroom, near Cooper Square, was three years ago, when I went seeking copies of columns that I had written between 1991 and 1998, during the third of my stints as Read More …

The record of wanton drunkenness among American undergraduates begins with what Harvard calls the Disorders Papers, 1676. A teen-aged student confessed that he’d hosted a day of drinking in his chamber. With two schoolmates, he caroused among a circle of Read More …

As a matter of obligation, not ego, Buddy Guy thinks of himself as the last bluesman—or, at least, the last master of the electrified Chicago blues. My Profile of Guy this week depends not only on conversations with him but Read More …

Scotty Bowers is one of the dirtiest nonagenarians you’re likely to come across. He’s also a Hollywood legend of sorts. Bowers has been called the “pimp to the stars,” “Hollywood’s gentleman hustler,” and “Mr. Sex,” which are all ways of Read More …

Sometime after 2009, when Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, becoming the first openly gay woman to run a major American city, she remembers being stopped in her garden by her activist neighbor Ray Hill for some idle chitchat. Read More …

This video, titled “Fraternity,” which I made in 2007, while studying at Yale University, depicts a performance of masculinity and élite-white-male rage, and was filmed inside the fraternity house of the Yale chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE). At the Read More …

The artist Nora Krug was born decades after Nazi rule, but, growing up in Karlsruhe, Germany, she felt yoked to the sins of the Holocaust. This wasn’t just because the war was studied closely at school. There were shadows closer Read More …

An appealing theme of Dan Taberski’s recent podcast “Headlong: Surviving Y2K” was the value of planning for possible calamity. Anticipating wide-scale chaos—like what might have befallen the world if most of its computers went berserk—made people in 1999 go a Read More …

Click:GEMO Beauty Device Often, the appeal in playing The Sims is watching humanoids navigate barely exaggerated scenarios inspired by your own life: finding a job, finding love, and, with luck, living to see old age. Major game-play additions—“expansion packs”—can propel Read More …