Tag Archives: truth-seekers

T he hotel room is cold, antiseptic, the only sound the gentle whisper of central air. I can’t go outside, my fixer tells me, or I might be kidnapped. From my window high up in the most expensive hotel in town, I look down at a baseball field and a …

S aigon, Vietnam, June 8, 1972. Just before sunrise, a small group of newsmen slid into combat fatigues and safari jackets before slipping through the waking city in a convoy of vans and rental cars. As they sped northwest, they snaked past legions of people seeking refuge, a silent cortege …

T he greatest lost concert in American history almost never happened at all. It was Oct. 27, 1968, in Palo Alto, California. Outside of his high school, Danny Scher, a 16-year-old, bushy-haired, jazz-obsessed, self-described “weirdo,” was pacing the parking lot waiting for his hero, and music’s most elusive and enigmatic …

I n the spring of 2024, while Andre Shariff Smith was leading the Ramadan community prayer, asking for forgiveness with his forehead planted in the prison mosque’s carpeted floor, Netflix was releasing the first episode of its new series Homicide: New York, “Carnegie Deli Massacre.” It was about the crime …

Disrupt the blood. Hack the hate. In Mountainhead, written, directed, and produced by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, these are just a few of the technocratisms bandied about by the four tech bros (played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith) who have gathered at a mountaintop …

I t was nearly midnight in February 2021 when Nasir Andar’s team of soldiers pinpointed the location of the suicide bomber’s house behind a police station in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. They crept up to the gate and called up the rest of the assault force, who would …

M y initiation into the cannabis trade began in a middle school bathroom. Dime bags led to ounces, which led to pounds, and in my early twenties, my partner “SOME” and I were doing Canadian border crossings and road trips from Northern California to New York City, where we landed …

O ne day well into President George W. Bush’s second term, an ultra-deep-cover Central Intelligence Agency officer flew back to the United States for a break from a yearslong assignment in the Middle East. The man had a bushy beard and a distinctive, needled scar on one arm from an …

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A., Jamila Wignot’s four-part HBO documentary about the legendary Memphis record label that produced Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, and others, offers incredible first-person stories. At one point, Booker T. Jones sits at a piano and shows exactly how he stumbled on the chords that became the 1962 chart-topper …

T he mood in hell was light. All smiles and hugs, Sammy Davis Jr. was in high spirits as he arrived at Paramount Studios in the fall of 1972 to film Poor Devil, a new NBC comedy set in the netherworld. The 46-year-old entertainer surveyed the Hollywood soundstage, where Hades …