In the summer of 1977 I got a magazine assignment to cover the trial of Roman Polanski. My daughter Holly was then thirteen—the same age as the girl Polanski was accused of seducing (I didn't know yet it was actually rape)—and Holly had decided to come to Santa Monica with...

This is a minor response to Chez Pazienza--the Guitar Hero with feet of claymation--and his post, "What a Long, Strange, Thoroughly Obnoxious Trip It's Been," a delusionally subjective, condescending blog, filled with hostile generalizations and a million exaggerations.

These days--despite the wingnuts media binge and the major disappointments of...

Four decades ago, along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage, I was headed for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash of LSD. If you happen...

Charles Manson was never a hippie. His real family included con artists, pimps, drug dealers, thieves, muggers, rapists and murderers. He had known only power relationships in an army of control junkies. Manson was America's Frankenstein monster, a logical product of the prison system -- racist, paranoid, violent -- even...

This month, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson family, is scheduled to be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas after serving 34 years behind bars for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. Squeaky did not participate in the Tate/LaBianca killings, which...

This satiric interview was originally published in High Times Magazine.

Q. What've you learned from this whole nuclear bong explosion?

A. I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late night talk show. I heard Jay Leno...

A friend of mine received an e-mail from Global Associated News, complete with a professional-looking logo of the globe. Their "Breaking News" was about the death of Jeff Goldblum. She forwarded it on to others, including a reporter. Later, when she learned that it was an untrue report, she felt...

I neglected to mention in my previous post that a January 2005 press release issued by the No Name-Calling Week Coalition stated: "Results from 2004 bullying surveys in schools indicated that students reported a significant decrease in the amount of bullying and harassment in school after taking part in the...

Arnold Schwarzennegger announced his candidacy for governor on the Tonight Show. John Edwards announced his candidacy for president on The Daily Show. And now Sarah Palin has in effect announced her candidacy for president in 2012 by denouncing Late Show host David Letterman for a joke about her daughter--the wrong,...

Whereas President Barack Obama ordered that Stephen Colbert be given a military shaved head on his visit to Iraq, the Treasury Department ordered that President Thomas Jefferson's image on the nickel be given a haircut.

You'll notice that he's gone from a left-side profile in 2004 to facing right in...

In a recent blog on HuffPost, Dennis Perrin criticized Jon Stewart for apologizing the day after he agreed with a guest that President Harry Truman was a war criminal. He wrote that "Stewart did what well-regarded mainstream entertainers do when expressing an unpopular opinion. He groveled for forgiveness....When an American...

I thought that some of you might enjoy this Q&A with me in The Sun magazine, an oasis in the desert of gossip mongering

And while I'm here in Blogsville, I'd like to thank Arianna publicly for writing an introduction to my upcoming book, Who's to Say What's Obscene?

The economic crisis has made its way into the nation's syndicated comic strips.

A few have included references to companies going bankrupt.

In "Rex Morgan, MD," Rex's family is on a cruise. In the ship's library, his wife June asks, "Is there a rental fee for the books?"

"You can...

In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece about San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, Josh Getlin perpetuated a myth when he wrote that Dan White "shot the mayor four times, twice in the head as he lay on the floor of his private back office. Standing astride the body,...

The Denver Police Department is facing several lawsuits over confrontations with protesters at the Democratic National Convention. The officers had conducted mass arrests and detentions of 154 individuals before and during the convention. One cop, for example, was videotaped pushing a woman to the ground with his baton as he...

Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine is an important and accessible book--not heavy on academic jargon, but rather lively and engaging, like a true detective novel--with a broad appeal to those interested in the medical potential of cannabis, an end to the drug war and grass roots activism. I...

Referring to the Ronald Reagan presidency, Neal Gabler has written about "the triumph of entertainment over political ideology of any sort." And Kurt Andersen labeled Bill Clinton the "Entertainer-in-Chief." The voters are the audience, conditioned to fear and superficiality in commercials for erectile dysfunction and political campaigns alike, both...

Oh, no! That New Yorker cover is going to ruin everything for Obama. This is the tipping point. Now he'll never get elected. I'm so disappointed. I had such great hopes. What can I do? Cancel my subscription to the First Amendment?

Fear. It's all about fear. I've always been...

Hi, my name is Paul. I'm a barista at Starbucks -- or I should say that I was a barista -- but I still feel that I am one, even though I've been given my walking papers, my pink slip, whatever you want to call it, I've been fired from...