The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. How did Quentin Tarantino, a high-school dropout and former video-store clerk, change the face of modern cinema? Mark Seal takes the director, his producers, and his cast back in time, to 1993.

ANSI (and ASCII) art dominated online communication for a short time. However, in that small window the medium evolved from a necessary function of early online systems into an art form on its own. Sixteen Colors was created to keep a history of the art form as seen from the production of the underground art scene that began in the 1990′s and continues today. Learn what it takes to compile hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork and how that artwork has changed over two decades.

While Odd Future are the face of hip-hop’s DIY audacity and Frank Ocean is R&B’s most compelling ascendant superstar, their managers (and guardian angels) are making the most of the music industry’s slow implosion.

Houser hasn't given a long interview to anyone but me, and that's baffling, because what he has to say is sincere, compelling and complex. He can be both insightful and rebellious, embracing different cultures and at the same time full of a healthy paranoia in a kind of punk-rock, hip-hop sort of way. He is an astute student of human nature and, as president of Rockstar Games, a tough negotiator when contracts come up for renewal with parent company Take-Two Interactive. Partly because of his reputation as a loner and recluse, everyone from journalists who can't get interviews to a handful of disgruntled former employees has labeled Houser crazy. He is not. He can be intensely private, even avoiding a GTA voice actor when he comes in to record his voice-over work. Houser is a workaholic and he's stubborn, clearly used to getting his way when he knows he's right, but he's definitely not crazy. In fact, there's something about Sam Houser that is close to genius. If Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto is the Steven Spielberg of video games, Houser is the Martin Scorsese.

November 23rd marks the 20th Anniversary of Snoop Dogg’s highly-acclaimed Doggystyle, in which his lyrical realism and distinctive vocal flow forever changed hip-hop and helped define the genre into what it is today. In honor of this date, Snoop has created an enticing mixtape of the samples used on Doggystyle. Never done before, Snoop offers exclusive commentary about each song and the behind-the-scenes stories that went on during the making of the historic record. The mixtape offers fans a once-in-a-lifetime experience to hear first-hand, the creative process behind the record.

There is a black market for stolen artworks, and according to the head of the F.B.I.'s art-crime team, Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, their prices are inevitably a small fraction of the works’ legitimate value. Some estimates put the average at 7 to 10 percent of perceived open-market value. A painting doesn’t need to be sold at auction to hold value. Even if it stays forever on the black market, it can be used as a kind of promissory note in a weapons or drug deal. Career criminals also believe they can extort a ransom from insurers or use the stolen work as a bargaining chip. A prison sentence, for instance, might be reduced in some jurisdictions in exchange for a criminal’s help in retrieving a missing Monet. In effect, an unframed canvas, easier to move across borders than its equivalent in cash or drugs, acts as a high-value and extremely pretty bank note.

“It was relatively easy,” said David Byrne, “back in the day, to work with only a smallish number of people watching, as we sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.” In the mid-’70s, the early days of his band Talking Heads, “we felt comfortable trying out different things, songs that were quickly abandoned and stage wear that proved impractical,” he wrote in an email. “That’s all hugely important (the songs part anyway) as it allowed us to explore, refine our identity and go down those musical dead ends without the embarrassment of public scrutiny.” Now, online exposure can make for an overnight viral sensation. But “it can also destroy and eliminate that crucial period of anonymity,” he said.

Inside a run-down mall off of Elizabeth Street in Chinatown, down an escalator to the basement and past a raft of empty storefronts, is a minuscule store, the size of a walk-in closet, that’s quietly at the center of a peculiar global fashion empire. It has no sign and it’s not on the mall directory. It’s impossible to find on Google. The enterprise, which its owner refers to as Unique Hype Collection, is in the business of buying clothing from the skate-inspired men’s fashion brand Supreme at retail prices, waiting until the items have sold out at Supreme’s physical stores and online shop, and then putting those items up for sale in the mall and on eBay at significant markups.

Within Amazon.com there’s a certain type of e-mail that elicits waves of panic. It usually originates with an annoyed customer who complains to the company’s founder and chief executive officer. Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark. When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.

Damon Lindelof, the ubiquitous ­screenwriter-producer whose name seems attached to all of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, is doing his damnedest to get small. This summer, he miraculously pulled Brad Pitt out of the mass grave that was World War Z’s zombocalyptic original third act and restored the regular-guyness that made Pitt’s character work. He also resisted the temptation to threaten Earth’s existence (yet again!) at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, focusing instead on a personal vendetta—albeit one enacted via a dizzying mile-high pursuit across a 23rd-century cityscape. But, hey, you have to give something to get something.

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

When we started running, the huge crowd in the park opened up like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was a good thing they did, because, boom, one of my friends opened fire. Everybody scrambled when they heard the gun. I realized that some of the Puma Boys had taken cover between the parked cars in the street. I had the M1 rifle, and I turned around quickly to see this big guy with his pistol pointed toward me. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he said to me. It was my older brother, Rodney. “Get the fuck out of here.” I just kept walking and left the park and went home. I was 10 years old.

Since the mid-1980s, he has been the industry’s very own burly, bearded version of Forrest Gump, appearing in the background, slightly blurry but ever present, at a remarkable number of key musical moments. Except that Rubin's ubiquity is not an accident. His production credits include LL Cool J’ Radio (which may have been the first real hip-hop album); The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill; “Walk This Way” by Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith; Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (as executive producer); the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik; Tom Petty’s Wildflowers; Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series; and various songs and albums by Justin Timberlake, System of a Down, Metallica, Slayer, Danzig, Weezer, AC/DC, Nine Inch Nails ... The list goes on.

SModcast is a weekly podcast featuring filmmaker Kevin Smith and his long-time producing partner Scott Mosier. Released each Sunday night/Monday morning, the episodes are generally one hour in length and feature Smith and Mosier discussing current events and other non-sequitur topics. In this Episode we hear tales of art, comics, sex, Facebook and all vices are explored to excess and we learn how boring our lives really are. With Special Guest artist and podcaster David Choe.

A cancer-ridden science teacher transforms himself into a sinister meth lord. That's the story of 'Breaking Bad.' But it's also the story of how Bryan Cranston became TV's greatest leading man. As the show enters its final stretch, GQ's Brett Martin discovers why Walter White will always live on.

To anyone who knows anything about skateboarding Mark Gonzales needs no introduction. To those who don't know, The Gonz is a legend, a fearless and anarchic exponent of a style of street skateboarding probably best described as insane.

Bei uns hier in Neukölln gibt's so ein Spiel, das spielen wir jedes Wochenende mit 30, 40 Jungs. Einer ist der Fänger und die anderen laufen weg. Und wenn er einen gefangen hat, darf er ihm 30 Sekunden lang Todesschläge geben und der darf sich nicht mal wehren. Danach ist er auch Fänger und darf seine Wut an den anderen auslassen. Einer bleibt am Ende übrig, der beste. Der, den sie nicht gekriegt haben. Und das ist dann der Gangsterläufer.

I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z. I think that’s a responsibility that I have, to push possibilities, to show people: “This is the level that things could be at.” So when you get something that has the name Kanye West on it, it’s supposed to be pushing the furthest possibilities. I will be the leader of a company that ends up being worth billions of dollars, because I got the answers. I understand culture. I am the nucleus.

But Kesselman noticed that the watermarks on his rolling papers were affecting the way in which the paper burned. “I’m always trying to improve the process,” he says, “it’s what I like to do. And this is going to sound strange, but when I’m sitting there smoking, I look at the burning embers, I watch them, I try to see what they are doing and what they are trying to tell me. I really try to connect with it. And I noticed that the embers were following the watermark in a certain way, that the watermark was affecting the burn, making it canoe or run. So I started experimenting. At first I tried to approach the way a scientist would. ‘Okay, so we need to make a cube pattern and control the flame, [Arnold Schwarzenegger voice] we must control the flame!’.

The oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker, in which an amateur named Moneymaker turned $39 into $2.5 million and the poker boom was born.

In the mid 90’s Ed Templeton started documenting life around him. As a professional skateboarder Ed has been able to travel the world on skate tours, giving him the opportunity to photograph his vision of contemporary culture and life around him. Ed’s camera mainly points towards the people he encounters in his everyday life, seeking for truthful moments to capture.

Recently, Tyler sat down at a sold event in New York’s Highline Ballroom to speak to Elliot Wilson, for the CRWN live interview series. The interview – which lasted over an hour – took place on April 23rd and was not your typical Tyler interview. Instead of the usual joke answers we have come to expect from Odd Future interviews, Tyler instead gave fans an insight into his life and creative process, among other things.

It was 1 in the morning. They were flummoxed by a safe. Jordan hadn't opened it in years, and he couldn't remember the combination. Everything else stopped as this consumed him. After 10 failed attempts, the safe would go into a security shutdown and need to be blown open. None of the usual numbers worked. Nine different combinations failed; they had one try left. Jordan focused. He decided it had to be a combination of his birthday, Feb. 17, and old basketball numbers. He typed in six digits: 9, 2, 1, 7, 4, 5. Click. The door swung open and he reached in, rediscovering his gold medal from the 1984 Olympics. It wasn't really gold anymore. It looked tarnished, changed -- a duller version of itself.