In May of 1981, a draft-dodging ex-pat American published his first story in Omni magazine. The event went largely unremarked. After all, Ronald Reagan was just a few months in office then, and that was either awesome or terrible, depending on your viewpoint, plus that was the same month the Pope got shot! Which is why we now have a Popemobile! But there at your local newsstand, or, if you were lucky (or your parents were generous), there in your mailbox in the plain brown wrapper, William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" saw print.

And as you may have heard, the Internet Archive has done the world a service by maintaining an [...]

It's a sad day for sleazy Italians and lovers of beaver shots everywhere: Penthouse founder Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione has passed away at the age of 79. Guccione, who forever changed the way we look at nude women—I mean, he really got up in there—is the first in the triumvirate our nation's naked lady picture pushers to die. Despite a glamorous, incredibly tacky life that featured forays into film, science ("He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.") and gambling, Guccione lived long enough to see his fortune melt [...]