Gawker
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prolonged obituaries
Why David Foster Wallace Killed Himself
We knew roughly that David Foster Wallace's lifelong struggle with depression pushed him to take his own life at 46 last month, but the details haven't been put together as comprehensively as they are in David Lipsky's feature in the Nov. 30th issue of Rolling Stone. Yes, Wallace hung himself in a dark room while his wife left the house for a few hours, but as Lipsky tells us, he was already dead. More » -
writing
David Foster Wallace's Early Years At Amherst
Rolling Stone is doing a profile of David Foster Wallace for its next issue, talking with family members and friends of the author, who committed suicide last month. The first segment available online details Wallace's early internal struggles while a student at Amherst College in the early 1980's. His good friend and roommate Mark Costello, also a novelist, talks about the Infinite Jest author's practiced and strict routine, his brief stint back home in Illinois where he sought psychiatric care, and his return the next year, with a new purpose towards writing. A passage from the article about his The Broom Of The System, a work first published in Amherst's literary magazine, offers a sadly prescient dissection of the tragedy that would occur some 25 years later: More » -
awkward
Rolling Stone Writer Tells Off National Review Writer On Crash
New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights: More » -
print is dead
The Incredible Shrinking Print Publications
As Sheila mentioned earlier, decreasingly-relevant music and culture mag Rolling Stone is shrinking! Yes the old pub wasn't quite gathering the same moss of ad dollars as it used to, so they've decided to go and be conventional like everyone else. The boxy Peter Travers beat-off rag (excuse my vulgarity, but really) used to be an inch taller and two inches wider than every other magazine, making it impossible—simply fucking exhaustingly impossible—to arrange properly on a coffee table. Now, no more. It'll fall in line with the rest of 'em. And it's not the only ancient parchment publication to downsize!
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the unspiked files
Death Of A Nethead
In 1999, Rolling Stone assigned Hollywood reporter Mark Ebner to the story of Philip Gale, an MIT prodigy born into Scientology who killed himself on the birthday of the cult's founder. The organization sent Rolling Stone a damning dossier on Ebner and the story was spiked. Ebner says he was told by his assigning editor that Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner was close to John Travolta, one of the sect's most prominent Hollywood supporters. Since then, the Church of Scientology has softened in its response to critics; and internet outlets have proven less easily browbeaten. So here—after the jump— is Ebner's original piece, Death of a Nethead. More » -
herogram
P.J. O'Rourke Will Probably Survive Anal Cancer
P.J. O'Rourke: is there a writer we more heartily wished had a blog right now? The country is in the throes of an ideological earthquake, and P.J. O'Rourke is a right-wing free-market ideologue who is too smart not to allow himself to be tossed around a bit, and too entertaining a writer to elicit much of our indignation in the case he doesn't end up landing that much closer on the spectrum to raging creative class Bolshevism. Well, we'd been wondering where the writer and Rolling Stone "foreign affairs desk" chief had been during the End of Capitalism, and it turns out today that he has been preoccupied getting ass cancer. (His phrase, not ours!) The good news is that it seems to have been detected early: he assures us he has a 95% chance of survival. The other good news: it's good material! From today's LA Times: More » -
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Rolling Stone Political Writer Is Useless
"Someone should tell Taibbi that it's the predictable disgust of people like him that make the culture-war posturing of people like Sarah Palin so resonant with the many, many folks who like pick-up trucks and plasma TVs and aren't ashamed of it." [Portfolio]
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magazines
Rolling Stone's Size Issues
Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner just confirmed to the Times that he's shrinking the once-groundbreaking magazine to a distinctly ordinary format. And already, in that same story, the magazine mogul has allowed himself to sound insecure about the change. “I myself was kind of torn about it,” Wenner said. He's right to be worried. Rolling Stone's large format stirred a certain nostalgia. And not just among readers, as the Times noted, but also among a more important group: The celebrities who still trip over themselves to appear on the magazine's iconic cover, despite the fairly humdrum content within. That magnetic draw will surely be diminished now that the publication looks so thoroughly contemporary, and 1967 so very far in the past. After the jump, Wenner pulls off a similarly-self-defeating trick in a year-old Charlie Rose interview by saying the key difference between rollingstone.com and Facebook is that the latter is "kind of a teen thing." More » -
children of
As Intern, Kurt Cobain's Daughter Considered A Bit Too Punk Rock
Did you know Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt's surprisingly well-adjusted daughter, is a "summer aide" at Rolling Stone? She is! Also, she's wayyy too rock and roll for the anal-retentive offices of the Wenner title. Insiders bitched to Page Six, "she doesn't get coffee for anyone . . . calls in sick all the time and wears funny outfits." First of all? She's 15. And second? Something tells me Evan Springsteen, Max Spielberg and Gus Wenner weren't fetching too many lattes last summer, either. Anyway, here are some conversation tips, courtesy a February article in People, in case she comes to collect your drink order: More » -
magazines
Jann Wenner's Missing Accent
An associate of Jann Wenner says the Us Weekly owner—rumored to be ready to sell the title to a magazine group such as Condé Nast—isn't so attached to the celebrity weekly. It's vastly profitable but doesn't really understand the modern pop culture from which Us Weekly plucks its stars. The source tells today's WWD: "It's not really his world, not like Rolling Stone, a world he instinctually understands." But just how clueless is the 62-year-old former hippie, who founded Rolling Stone at the age of 21 after dropping out of Berkeley? His minions joke that Wenner's musical evolution ground to a halt some two decades ago. He's never quite figured out that Us Weekly staple Beyoncé has one of those accents at the end of her name. Wenner refers to her as be-yons, much to colleagues' amusement. One hopes he doesn't refer to his hoped-for buyer as "cond-nast".
Rolling Stone
New York, 1:25 PM
Thu Nov 20
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