Justin Nobel is writing a book about oil-and-gas radioactivity for Simon & Schuster. This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long — he was …
Read More »That Marianne Mind$et: Obeying the Law of Divine Compensation
If you signed up for the Marianne Williamson campaign mailing list earlier this year, you might have gotten an email in early August from an entity called the Williamson Institute; subject: “Summer Sale Now On!” If you opened it, you would have been greeted by a soft-focus portrait of the …
Read More »David Byrne on Finding Happiness Among Chaos, His 'American Utopia' Broadway Residency
“With Stop Making Sense, we brought everything onstage so people could see what it takes to put on a show, and with this, I’m taking everything away,” David Byrne says of American Utopia, his quasi-theatrical Broadway residency, which is scheduled to run into next year. “I wondered, ‘Can we do …
Read More »'It Was One Problem After Another': How Woodstock 50 Fell Apart
A month before Woodstock 50 was announced, the festival was already in deep trouble. Last December, Michael Lang, the co-founder of the original 1969 event who had become its bemused-hippie symbol in subsequent decades, was in talks with an upstate New York racetrack for a fest that would mark the …
Read More »King Crimson's 50th Anniversary Press Day: 15 Things We Learned
Coming onstage at 10:30 a.m. London time on Saturday, Robert Fripp got right to the point. “I don’t know what your personal aims are for today, but I’ll declare mine,” the guitarist and longtime King Crimson bandleader said. “My primary interest is to introduce King Crimson to innocent ears, that …
Read More »Meet the Real Estate Appraiser of the World's Most Gruesome Murder Sites
“Oh, I’ll tell you a bizarre one!” Randall Bell says. His tone is so cheery that I half expect him to launch into a recounting of his fondest childhood memory, or a ranking of his favorite Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavors. But instead, he tells a story about a …
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