Patrick Brown has been photographing in tough environments his entire career, but nothing could have prepared him for when he began documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis in 2017. “I was taken back by the pure scale of it,” he says. “A hundred people turn into thousands and then thousands turn …
Read More »Love Lifts Us Up: 'Moulin Rouge! the Musical' Packs More Pop Than One Show Can Handle
Moulin Rouge! the Musical: 3/5 Stars There was a show. A very strange, enchanted show. Entering the red light-coated Al Hirschfeld Theatre, with the stage flanked on either side with a giant red windmill and a large elephant’s head, you’re immediately asked to immerse yourself in the dreamlike, fantastical world …
Read More »Has There Really Been a Rash of Herpes Outbreaks at Music Festivals?
Last month, multiple news outlets reported that there had been a rash of herpes outbreaks at Coachella, the annual music festival in the California desert. The source of the reports was an app called HerpAlert, which diagnoses and treats herpes. HerpAlert reported a significant uptick of herpes inquiries in the …
Read More »What, Exactly, Is an NDA?
If you pay any regular attention to the news cycle (or for that matter, network TV police procedurals), you’ve probably noticed one legal term popping up over and over again: non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. Over the past few years, NDAs have been used by the wealthy and the powerful, from …
Read More »Menendez Brothers Found on 1990-91 NBA Trading Card
The Menendez brothers may not be part of official collectible sets of killer trading cards — which sparked outrage when they were first introduced in 1992 and have continued to be controversial as new editions pop up every few years — but their surprise cameo on an NBA trading card …
Read More »Why 2019 Will Be the Year of Weed
In 2018, pot reached a tipping point. A clear majority of Americans now wants to see the drug made fully legal. California and Canada began selling marijuana to anyone over 21. Corporate behemoths like Altria (parent company of Marlboro cigarettes) and Constellation Brands (parent of Corona beer and Svedka vodka) …
Read More »Best True-Crime Podcasts of 2018
It would be an understatement to say that 2018 was a good year for true-crime podcasting —in fact, there’s a bit of a glut in the crime market these days. The soaring popularity of shows like My Favorite Murder, Casefile and Up and Vanished has fired up the imaginations of …
Read More »New Manson Doc Goes Inside Spahn Ranch
It would be easy to believe that Fox’s new two-hour, Liev Schreiber-narrated special, Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes,would simply re-trod old territory. With so much already out there on the man, his followers and their infamous two-day murder spree in Los Angeles in August 1969, does this documentary …
Read More »New Service Promises to Manipulate Your Wife Into Having Sex With You
Relationships, the saying goes, are hard. Many couples find their sex drives are mismatched over time, a problem that sex therapists often suggest fixing by working on communication. The Spinner, launched in April of this year, offers a different route to marital bliss — the online service encourages dissatisfied husbands …
Read More »Porn Star Alex Jones Is Having a Weird Week
On Monday, YouPorn banned Alex Jones from its platform. No, the Infowars conspiracy theorist best known for his red-faced rants and pushing prepper kits didn’t put erotic videos on the crowd-sourced site himself — thank goodness — but there were reportedly half a dozen videos taken down, both copyrighted clips …
Read More »