In 1989, Playboy was preparing to publish a story from a new collection by a young writer named David Foster Wallace when some editors happened to catch a two-year-old episode of Late Night with David Letterman. There, onscreen, were Letterman and his guest, the actress Susan St. James, speaking dialogue from…
Happy New Year! Apparently a fun new year activity for many Gawker readers is uploading pictures of famous people from their yearbooks or Google Images. Therefore, we have compiled yet another compendium of all-star yearbook photos for you to peruse. Look at all these shining little faces before they made it big. Some…
In a news release today, relatives of the late David Foster Wallace said that they are "opposed" to the making of the forthcoming James Ponsoldt-directed biopic of the author, which stars Jason Segel as Wallace and is titled The End of the Tour.
Courtesy of Instagrammers at the Mall of America, we now have a first look at How I Met Your Mother's Jason Segel as the late David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour.
Today in castings that make you go "hmmmm" in a way that is maybe more intrigued than skeptical (obviously a routinely updated news category), Jason Segel — you may remember his dick — will play the mercurial author David Foster Wallace in a new movie called The End of the Tour.
Ever since David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, the late novelist's friends and literary executors have been exploring the intersection of canonization, exploitation, and vengeance. His publishing house chopped and shuffled his unfinished and unfinishable final manuscript into a "posthumous novel." Jonathan…
ONE WEIRD TRICK to Being a Good Person: Here's a newly-conceived and filmed version of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon commencement speech "This Is Water" (using an abridged version of the original audio), for visual learners among you.
I've dicked around on Twitter long enough to be able to have a composite persona of it in my head. If Twitter were a person, it would look like a hipster and it would like hipster music, but it would fucking HATE hipsters. It would be socially liberal, but it would totally respect Ron Paul for being genuine about his…
Mike Daisey has been roundly and justly castigated for selling his bullshit stories about visiting the Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China, to This American Life. But even some of his harshest critics are buying into the idea that, in some contexts—just not "journalistic ones"—it's OK to tell little lies in service of…
Graduation season always brings with it entertaining tales of lazy, desperate, or just plain dumb graduation speakers, who chose to plagiarize their speeches. Already this year we've had a medical school dean ripping off Atul Gawande, and a law school graduate pleading ignorance about the fact that plagiarism is…
The Pale King, the unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace, will be released April 15.
As of today, it's been a year since David Foster Wallace died. Wallace was an important author and teacher; incidentally, the first movie adapted from his work is about to come out. n+1—yes, that n+1—has a nice remembrance.
The Office prettyboy John Krasinski was the first to get a movie based on a David Foster Wallace book off the ground, into production, and into release. The trailer's finally arrived. It did pretty well at Sundance. How's it look?
In a 2004 issue of academic journal Modernism/Modernity, David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion was reviewed by Jay Murray Siskind, a professor at Blacksmith College, and a fictional Don DeLillo character. And no one noticed!
LA police, responding to an alarm at Lindsay Lohan's home, thought the house had been "ransacked," when in fact it was merely the dwelling of a slob. George Clooney parties like an fratty ibanker.
The New Yorker's lengthy profile of David Foster Wallace broke some news: Little, Brown will publish the late novelist's unpublished manuscript for "The Pale King" in 2010. Chunks have already appeared online.
So yesterday we showed you "Why Obama Won", the website about how Obama voters are all imbeciles. There was a poll and stuff. 538's Nate Silver had a friendly interview with that site's mastermind, former radio talk show host John Ziegler. By "friendly" we mean it ends with "go fuck yourself" and a click. Related:…
This month's Rolling Stone cover story details the circumstances of David Foster Wallace's death. That article was written before Wallace's autopsy report was publicly released, and new details have emerged that can't help but color our understanding of his last days. Click to find out what's new.The most striking new…
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…
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…
