Albert Hoffman, the inventor and "father" of L.S.D. died yesterday at the age of 102. Without the invention of his powerfully influential drug, we probably wouldn't have had Hunter S. Thompson or the Grateful Dead, and those planetarium laser shows of the 70's would have been considerably less profitable. Then...

I don't know what Bloomberg's SAT scores were. I'm thinking they were somewhere above 700 verbal, maybe a little better on the math side. I'm thinking Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, did pretty well too (if I were a gambling man, I would bet Larry did...

As we bemoan the fate of Tibet and rush to fill the streets in the big game of "douse the torch," it's important to keep in mind the many ways that we ourselves continue to trample on the rights of nations that live with us right here on our own...

Forget Paris and Rome, nothing can compare with the romantic passion pouring out of Detroit these days. Spring has barely sprung, but the whole city is like an endless Barry White song with its bad ass bass line just shaking everything up. Love is in the airwaves, in the paper,...

Combating questions as to how she could speak of the "Dream Ticket" of Clinton/Obama while simultaneously insinuating that Obama is ill-prepared for higher office, Senator Hillary Clinton announced today that Barack's recent wins in Wyoming and Mississippi had more than proved his capabilities as a vice-president contender. "To be honest,"...

The series of scandals featuring so-called memoir writers who actually made up their "true stories," (and, in the case of J.T. Leroy, made up the writer himself) speaks to the importance of having editors level-headed enough to ask the tough questions. Because writers tend to live in a kind of...

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson.

Why write a book?

In an age of video games, reality television and blogosphere hyper-saturation, it might seem like we don't need any more novels.

But when I started writing my book, it was more...

I'm no labor historian, but it seems that if some well-placed people want to end this writer's strike, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner just pulled the barn door wide open.

Cruise and Wagner's United Artists signed a side deal with the WGA, making them the only ones doing business in...

Dear Santa,

It's been a so-so year. Could have been better. Jenna wrote a book (Gosh, didn't see that coming! Who'd a thunk it. I sure couldn't do that.) and, well, I guess that's all that happened that was any good.

Okay, real quick 'cause it's bedtime, here's my list...

I'm fascinated how, amid the Punch n' Judy show of "Hillary's people said this about Obama" and "Oprah said this about Obama" and "Bill said this about Hillary," John Edwards still remains so firmly in the race. It's pretty stunning. He just keeps going and going and going.

It gives...

I noticed that some entity called the American Society of Criminology just named Detroit "the nation's most dangerous city." They based their report on recent FBI crime statistics, though the FBI quickly announced that such reports offer only "simplistic and or incomplete analyses."

I actually live in the...

Panic swept through Hollywood today as producers and studio executives, already embattled by the writer's strike, learned of an ancient tool recently unearthed by a team of international scientists. Placed in the hands of ordinary Americans, this primitive technology threatens to completely destabilize the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.

"It's called...

Pelosi and Reid are just about to do the stupidest thing imaginable: pull the rug out from underneath the blossoming renewable energy economy at the time when we need it most.

(Start reaching for your phone...)

Just as every single magazine in the country is giving the energy crisis more...

Has anyone else noticed Laura Bush getting a wee bit political of late? First there was her surprisingly vocal stance on the Myanmar crisis, then her public snubbing of Iran's President Ahmadinejad at the U.N.

Could it be that, in some strange Republican back room, they're tearing a page...

Just over twenty years ago - while George Bush was up to his ears in dodgy stock deals over at Harken - Elaine May, Warren Beatty, and Dustin Hoffman went off to the desert to make a movie called Ishtar.

Little did they realize that they were embarking on an...

Dear Joel Silver,

Finishing the incredibly excellent Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill, my first thought was "Holy Shit, this is mind blowing." Which, coincidentally, is exactly what I said when I first saw your Die Hard. Putting those two facts together, I've...

While Bush has done his part to erode our fundamental right to justice and liberty, he still hasn't been able to cut us off from our most basic freedoms.

Which is nice.

Turns out the Founding Fathers were like muscle-bound superheroes who, using their most excellent superpowers, managed...

The former greenhouse gas deniers like George Will and Glenn Beck are now claiming that, yes, climate change is happening, but there's nothing we could do because it would be too expensive to address, (their policy can be briefly summed up as "Saving the world is expensive so let's just...

Today the While House released their final report on how 5 million emails had vanished from their computers. "Apparently, Richard Nixon's personal secretary Rose Marie Woods was responsible for accidentally deleting the emails." said the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, testifying on the Hill today.

Democrats expressed disbelief at the Attorney...

My fellow Americans,

I have tonight asked the Department of Homeland Security to raise the National Threat Advisory to Glowing Purple. That's above our previous high of Red, or "Severe." I don't know what word goes with Glowing Purple. All I know is it's a crazy, intense color and these...