Not that long ago, a dark thriller featuring Kevin Spacey as a smooth-talking stranger who arrives in a small town with an apparent vendetta against one of its inhabitants might have been a major movie event. He was, after all, a hugely popular and critically acclaimed actor, known for playing …
Read More »Fergie Chambers Is Heir to One of America's Richest Families — and Determined to See the U.S. Fall
A round 8 a.m. on a cool, clear Monday in mid-November, James Cox Chambers Jr. is in Gresham Park, in southeast Atlanta, bouncing on the balls of his feet, shadowboxing the air in front of him. Dressed in a black hoodie with a Palestinian flag on it, black sweatpants, black …
Read More »Art Williams Went From Forging $100 Bills to a Career as an Artist
‘Orgasm is a good comparison, but there aren’t really any words for that feeling,” is how Art Williams described the first time he counterfeited to Rolling Stone back in 2005. A heavily disadvantaged, gifted kid from Chicago’s South Side, he learned the age-old criminal craft from his mother’s boyfriend, then …
Read More »Shohei Ohtani Interpreter's Bombshell Gambling Scandal: What We Know So Far
On March 20, lawyers for Shohei Ohtani accused the Dodgers star’s longtime interpreter and close friend of stealing millions of dollars from the athlete to cover bets with an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. It’s a remarkable story with many layers. There’s the alleged betrayal by Ippei Mizuhara, who …
Read More »They Signed Up to Grow Weed. Then New York State Pushed Them Into the Black Market
O n a rainy day toward the end of September, a longtime underground marijuana grower we’ll call Shawn coasted up I-86 from the Hudson Valley to Rochester to meet with a legal farmer. The farmer hadn’t been able to sell his harvest for over a year, despite owning a fully …
Read More »Meet the Lady Carnivores Taking Over TikTok With Butter and Raw Meat
Many of the videos on Isabella Ma’s TikTok page feature the same approximate thumbnail: a grinning Ma, with razor-sharp cheekbones, stick-straight black hair, and flawlessly appointed eyebrows, her mouth wide open, poised to take a bite out of a giant stick of butter, as if it were a freshly peeled …
Read More »Trisha Paytas Spent Years Trolling. Has She Finally Grown Up?
T risha Paytas is telling me about the last time she got yelled at on the internet. It was after a Halloween episode of her podcast, Just Trish, in which the influencer and YouTuber dressed as her then-obsession, the Weeknd in the HBO series The Idol. Wearing pale-pink hospital scrubs, …
Read More »'Stormy' Doc Is a Portrait of a Messy, Complicated, Courageous Woman
Five years ago, Stormy Daniels found herself in the bizarre position of being one of the most ostensibly powerful, yet simultaneously vulnerable, women in America. The former porn star found herself in a nationwide tabloid maelstrom when it was reported that she had had a very brief sexual relationship with …
Read More »'I Need You to See How the Girls in Baltistan Live'
The school had dirt floors and no chairs for the kids to sit on, let alone desks to work at. The 20 or so ninth-graders knelt shyly in formation on the carpet. Hana and I stood at the head of the room, two prep-school girls from the Upper East Side …
Read More »Adam McKay Explains His Made-You-Look Take on Climate Activism
Adam McKay would like to bring to your attention that the world is burning. “We’re living in a ridiculous farcical comedy, but the consequences are real,” says the director who turned a planet-ending comet into a metaphor for climate change in his film Don’t Look Up. “We can’t seem to …
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