Amazon has pillaged the planet in its quest for world domination. Music has not been spared.

There is a moment in "Shrek" when the despicable Lord Farquaad has the Gingerbread Man tortured by dipping him into milk. This prepares us for another moment when Princess Fiona's singing voice is so piercing it causes jolly little bluebirds to explode; making the best of a bad situation, she fries their eggs. This is not your average family cartoon. "Shrek" is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

Matthew Simmons writes about the open heart of a user known as Beebee.

Bun B is half of the legendary hip-hop group UGK. His partner, Pimp C, died in 2007. Their new album is UGK For Life.

Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life.

Welcome to this edition of Weekly Musings, where each Wednesday I share some thoughts about what's caught my interest in the last seven d...

The trio is back together to talk about this week’s mental health, tech conference hopes, music festival tragedies, and some great apps.

In our November cover story, Taylor Swift talks to Chuck Klosterman about whether or not she really hates Katy Perry

In the late 2000s I was sleeping with all of my friends. This didn’t make me special; we were young in one of the several ways people move to cities like New York in order to be young. We were in general not doing much with our lives and so we did what generation after generation of young people have done in order to combat that particular circumstance: We tried to generate enough sex drama amongst ourselves that we didn’t have to notice that we weren’t doing much of anything, that things were harder than they were promised to be, that we had very little money and that everyone else seemed ...

The remarkable story of the woman who showed us all how to stare down death: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, […]

The joy of the free-diver, the peace of the loon, the patience of the turtle, and a touch of the ingenuity and panache of the great sea explorers (a Jacques Cousteau or a Captain Nemo). Tending my depths, plunging into seas uncharted, dipping into mysterious pools and emerging to share the treasures and tales I find there (and perhaps hiding a few treasure maps of my own).

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance.

It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.

The telegram was a breakthrough in communication technology, which Vannevar Bush imagined could evolve in unprecedented ways.