Tag Archives: long-reads

Absent from the stage and on a self-declared “indefinite hiatus” since May 2019, Turnpike Troubadours — a band known as much for its volatility as for its literary songs and stomping melodies — have hit the most-anticipated reset button in Americana music. The group will headline the venerable Red Rocks …

T aylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.” Swift showed up without a …

I’m never more black than when I talk about country music. By which I mean: I’m never more aware of my blackness than when I’m rambling on about my love of the genre, receiving quizzical looks back. The unspoken onus in the moment is: Explain yourself — how do you …

It was late November 2017, and Matthew Bowen, a veteran Border Patrol agent, was seething. A fellow Border Patrol agent in Texas had just been found dead in the field, and Bowen was certain someone who’d been crossing the border illegally was responsible for murdering him. “Snuffed out by some …

For most of the decade between his 2008 acquittal on child pornography charges and 10-count indictment on aggravated criminal sexual abuse charges in February, R. Kelly‘s star continued to rise. While the R&B superstar wasn’t selling at nearly the same level as previous years, he still published his memoir Soulacoaster: …

Last September, an image surfaced on Instagram of Emma Coronel Aispuro, the 29-year-old former beauty queen and wife of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, hosting her seven-year-old daughters’ Barbie-themed birthday party at a sprawling mansion in Culiacan, in the Mexican region of Sinoloa. In one photo, Coronel Aispuro, in a bedazzled …

Roseanne no longer holds the record for the ugliest endgame in TV history. The new champion is …Roseanne. Back in 1997, America’s favorite family flamed out with an “it was all a dream” final season that insulted any fan who ever loved the Conners. But then, like so many stories, …

The hip-hop one-percenter life is a gated mansion in Atlanta that sits on more than two acres and has two Bentleys in front of it, and when you open the front door a cloud of weed smoke punches you in the face. Welcome to the huge, half-empty house owned by …

Kitti Jones had been dreaming of this moment for years. It was June 2011, and R. Kelly had just performed to a frenetic crowd at the Verizon Theatre outside Dallas, Texas. It had been nearly two decades since the singer’s raunchy lyrics and honeyed voice turned him into a R&B …