Long before real estate and Wall Street collapsed, the music industry was already swooning. Executives were in a panic as consumers deserted the megastores and stayed home to download files illegally. But even as the biggest recording labels endured wrenching pain, a small label in North Carolina...

Was it really just a year ago? Was it really just September of 2008 when several of our august financial institutions, already teetering, abruptly toppled, proving they weren't too big to fail? The whole world was wincing, but one group refused to panic: visual artists. In the past 12 months,...

Six years ago, a young memoirist named James Frey smacked the rarefied literary world with A Million Little Pieces, a down-and-dirty memoir of addiction and recovery whose hard-boiled prose spurted his blood and broken teeth into startled readers' cappuccinos. As he threw elbows at popular peers...

I'm a Mac ... and I'm conflicted. For the past 15 years, I've barely placed my finger on a PC, either at work or at home. I've spent most of my career as a magazine editor, a profession that relies almost exclusively on Macs as its primary tool, and over time, Apple's platform has necessarily been...

No media corporation is immune to today's advertising downturn, and Clear Channel Communications, an immense and fearsome force in radio, is no exception. A radio conglomerate in business since 1972, Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, Texas, seemed invincible back in 1996, when new regulations...

Reasonable minds may disagree on whether The New York Times is the finest newspaper in the country. Most of us, however, would at least allow that it has entrenched itself, over more than a century and a half of publishing, as our national newspaper of record. Anything that reflects a city as...

TiVo. iPod. Prius. For years, global corporations' marketing teams and branding firms have had a bit of fun coming up with their own made-up words, leaving their dictionaries in the drawer. Making up words for the global market is so much fun -- and such big business -- that MacArthur "genius"...

Ah, Sunday morning! It's nearly upon us again. The languid wake-up. The mocha java. The nova and cream cheese. The tangy mimosa. The New York Times. The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Magazine's Money Issue. The glance at the table of contents. The flipping ahead. The credit and credit...

Rock veteran Dean Wareham remembers exactly where he was when he witnessed the asteroid that was coming to kill the dinosaurs. At a party one night in 2001, someone turned off the CD player and fired up a computer running a music file sharing program. As the founder of the influential indie-rock...

Imaginary transcript from NBC's "Weekend Update," Season 1, Episode 1: Announcer: From Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, it's "Weekend Update," with Team WalletPop! [Cheers and applause] Hello, we're WalletPop, and here's tonight's top story: The New York Times reports that NBC will spin off...