If there’s one lesson Netflix learned from its runaway 2020 hit The Witcher, it’s this: In these troubled times, the viewing public is voracious for escapist fantasy television. And not just any form of the genre — the kind with big-budget effects, deep world-building, tangled romances, and labyrinthine, intertwining plots …
Read More »Nicki Minaj Revisits a Distant Golden Age With 'Beam Me Up Scotty'
Last Friday’s re-release of Nicki Minaj’s breakout 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty comes as a growing number of popular artists open up their back-catalogs to streaming platforms. For artists whose profile grew at the height of the blog era, many of these early releases offer a look at important …
Read More »All of Pop Music Is Olivia Rodrigo's Playground
Olivia Rodrigo could have been designed in a laboratory as the perfect teen pop star — except the best part is how gloriously, messily, authentically human she is. She’s a whole new pop-queen paradigm, ripping up the old playbook and starting again. She seemingly blew in out of nowhere to …
Read More »How Federal Prohibition Is Turning Cannabis Into a Climate Villain
Traveling north from San Francisco, the rolling vineyards of wine country soon give way to stands of redwoods and the famed cannabis lands known as the Emerald Triangle, where the local microclimate gives rise to some of the world’s most storied weed. But while you can pick up a bottle …
Read More »Kimbal Musk's Quest to Start One Million Gardens
On the day he almost died, Kimbal Musk had food on the brain. The internet startup whiz, restaurateur, and younger brother of Tesla’s Elon had just arrived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from a 2010 TED conference where chef Jamie Oliver had spoken about the empowerment that could come from healthy …
Read More »How Jada Pinkett Smith and Family Built the Realest Talk Show on TV
When Willow Smith was 11, she made a request of her mom, the actress and musician Jada Pinkett Smith: “I know you as my mother, but I want to know who you were before you were my mother.” Pinkett Smith was shocked that her daughter was already curious in that …
Read More »Buying Beats for Viral Songs Is Becoming a Popular (and Messy) Business
Caleb Hearn and Jason Messer used to be inseparable. “We did everything together,” says Hearn, a 20-year-old singer from King, North Carolina. But on February 18th, 2017, when Messer asked his friend to go hiking in nearby Hanging Rock State Park, Hearn had to bow out — he had a …
Read More »How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era
Jennifer Jones spent most of her summer at home, as so many of us did, trying to avoid the plague. Jones, 45, lives in Tavernier, a community in the Florida Keys just south of Key Largo, and passed a lot of time in her yard, puttering around with plants. At …
Read More »Evanescence's Amy Lee Gets Back to Life
Amy Lee misses Brooklyn. She lived there for 12 years with her husband (and later their son, born in 2015), before they left their apartment for Nashville a year ago. “The perfect year,” she says with an eye roll over Zoom. Lee had hoped to be closer to her family …
Read More »Producer Ted Templeman Remembers Eddie Van Halen: 'He Wasn't Just a Shredder'
The first time that producer Ted Templeman saw Van Halen playing at the Starwood in West Hollywood one night in 1977, he burst out of the club’s doors to find the nearest payphone. He called Donn Landee, a recording engineer he worked closely with, and left several messages. “You’ve got …
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