Nathan Rabin is a staff writer at the forthcoming site The Dissolve, which was formed with Pitchfork from the mass exodus from The A.V. Club, where he was head writer. Back in 2010, Rabin set out to write a book about Phish and Insane Clown Posse, two bands who are as ignored by the mainstream music world as they are adored by their fans. He followed Phish on tour that summer and then went to the Gathering of the Juggalos, ICP’s annual 4-day festival, finding both experiences to be intriguing but less than affecting.

Then, as they say, everything went wrong. Rabin went broke, lost a year’s worth [...]

Oh my God, these queens are absolutely crushing it on the matters of color palette ramifications in "Mad Men." This report will change your life in how you watch the show.

Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos. @blingringmovie

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) May 2, 2012

Nancy Jo Sales published "The Suspects Wore Louboutins" in Vanity Fair in March of 2010. Sofia Coppola announced optioning the article by December of 2011; Emma Watson was cast by February of 2012; the resulting movie, The Bling Ring, opens in a month.

But first! Tomorrow comes The Bling Ring—the book. Nancy Jo Sales started afresh. She already had, after all, endless hours of interviews with the crowd of young people in Southern California who burgled celebrity homes. In [...]

Did you ever get around to reading the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle like I suggested you do last summer? Probably not. Life is full of choices, most of them bad, and in between our trying—on the days we try—and mostly failing, a few hundred pages of intensely detailed Norwegian memoir are probably too much to bear even conceptually. I'm not judging you. Lord knows there are plenty of things I don't want to do either. But I am telling you that you are missing out. In any event, the second volume is arriving on these shores and there's an excerpt in the [...]

This article on Jamaican party videos—"simply start-to-finish recordings of parties, from the sluggish arrival of guests, to awkward milling, to rum-punch sipping, to a crescendo of feverish dancing to a popular form of music known as dancehall. The camera keeps rolling until the last sweaty guests wobble home on their heels. The films are typically watched beginning to end, an activity that can take as long as six hours"—is pretty fascinating. Perhaps the most jarring part, particularly if you are just being introduced to the whole concept through this piece, comes toward the end when, spoiler, it is revealed that "Western influence and the rise of Internet video sharing [...]

I have of late become a remarkably slow reader of books. I blame this on any number of things—the constant state of distraction with which we all now contend, an increasing lack of interest in devoting the disturbingly brief amount of time I have remaining on this earth to the act of consuming anything that requires sustained concentration, all the fucking periodicals that are piling up and mocking me from the magazine rack (Cabinet specializes in urbane yet cutting remarks about my intellectual vigor, the New Yorker raises a smug eyebrow while questioning my compassion for the poor people of Syria and the New York Review of Books berates my [...]

Skating in Central Park with Pippa Middleton, Iranian Space Monkey & Bibi Netanyahu. Pippa makes a play-hat of Monkey as Bibi pirouettes.

— Dana Vachon (@danavachon) February 5, 2013

Dana Vachon is one of our favorite writers, but also publishes rarely. So when he drops a short story on Twitter late at night, it's our duty to carefully collect his leavings.

"[S]uch pure pop storytelling that reading it is like hearing the best song of summer squirt out of the radio. Both the author and his subjects are so audacious that they frequently made me laugh out loud…. 'Even the dullest skyjacking made for scintillating copy. And the truly sensational ones were like gifts from the journalism gods.' Upon Mr. Koerner, those gods have smiled." —The New York Times kind of likes Brendan I. Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. For what it's worth, I do too.

It says here that Lori Carson's Where It Goes was one of the 10 best albums of the '90s, a decade that had a pretty good amount of best albums in it. Anyway, her debut novel The Original 1982 is out today. I don't know much about it, but there's a whole long-ass interview with her here that is worth listening to. (Also if you have never heard Where It Goes I should warn you that it is just a tad bleak, so if you're currently in a staying-away-from-the-sharp-objects mood you might want to steer clear for the moment. Unless you want to wallow, it's a great [...]

Remember "Adventures in Depression"? Well, here's "Depression Part Two." Read and share.

"In Mayberry, Thelma Lou didn’t put a cigarette out on Barney’s arm like my girlfriend did to on mine; Andy Taylor wasn’t embittered or slump-shouldered after a lifetime of ridicule by those with more social status; no Beasley beat his wife half to death with a shoe. Still, Mayberry was a believable universe without these things. Tools of television helped make this true — camera angles, lighting, a disciplined laugh track, extras so far in the background they are almost invisible, along with other aspects I’ve mentioned. But there is one thing about the story that has not been discussed, and it is the thing that gives it gravitas, [...]

"Dear Residents of 208 East 7th Street: Sorry for leaving that couch outside our door on the fourth-floor stairwell for two weeks.

We were just moving in to the building, my friend Tim and I, fall of 1995. I graduated from college that spring, and this was the first apartment I ever officially leased. And I didn’t know a lot about neighborly etiquette. Or making a good first impression.

The couch did not completely block the stairwell, or access to the hallway off which our door opened. It was off to the side, tipped up on an armrest, leaning vertically against the wall. Obviously we would have preferred it [...]

Hey, I heard a bit of Rachel Kushner's new novel The Flamethrowers last night, and it is awesome. It comes out in April, which is exactly when one wants a book. Do you like books? You should pre-order this book then! The joy of pre-ordering books is that you forget you've ordered them and then they arrive and you're like "what is this??" and then you're like "OH HEY THIS IS SUPER DUPER GOOD." (Disclaimer: it's entirely possible that she read the sole lone only good part of the book and the rest is hot trash, but that seems unlikely.)

What with the broad selection of items from which to choose it almost seems too easy to allow an artisanal Brooklyn-made heirloom pepper probiotic hot sauce that was produced via a Kickstarter campaign to cause one to consider just how awful the city can be, and yet the results of such a realization are difficult to argue with.

"We are THRILLED AND TICKLED BEYOND BELIEF to announce the launch of Lizzie Skurnick Books, your gateway to the best YA from the 1930s through the 1970s. Get ready: Starting this fall, we'll be publishing a novel a month for your pleasure, delectation, and book-collecting needs. For Fall 2013, join us in wel­coming back novels from seven pio­neers in the field: Y.A. greats Lois Duncan, M.E. Kerr, Ellen Conford, Lila Perl, Sandra Scoppettone and Berthe Amoss, and MacArthur 'genius' award-winner Ernest J. Gaines. " —Do this or I won't like you anymore.

"The summer following the winter that my mother took off into something called Women's Land for what I could only guess would be all eternity, my father decided that there was no choice but for him to quit his despised job and take me and my brother to the beach for at least the entire summer and possibly longer."

—How can you not want to read September Girls since it has one of the great first sentences of all time?

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There are a lot of thoughts here about tattoos.

"All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one [...]

So you know, I've been all, "Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is one of the great heartbreaking novels of the 20th Century" for years now, and while you've always said, "You know, that Balk is not only devilishly handsome and a charming raconteur but someone whose cultural recommendations have never failed to make me feel satisfied, smarter and frankly better about myself as a person," you have then completely forgotten to pick it up. I get it. Stuff happens. Life gets in the way. The world is full of distractions. That is why, right now, I want you to stop what you're doing and click on [...]

For a long time I would start my sentences with "In a more perfect world," but as my inexorable march toward death has collected celerity I have found myself considerably more likely to accept the inevitable and do my part to glean the good in things, no matter how difficult they are to discover and ultimately unsatisfying they may be, which means I am making many more declarations front-loaded with resignation and grudging acceptance about how "I guess we should be happy that we live in a world where." Which is to say that while in a more perfect world the novelist Percival Everett would dominate the bestseller list to [...]