Rachael Maddux

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You haven’t even cleared Thanksgiving, let alone started drafting your best of 2010 lists (um, well, maybe you’re already working on that, you nerds), but there’s already a growing heap of new music to look forward to in the early months of 2011.

Roger Ebert, like so many millions of other people who are not the most famous film critic in America, has a Twitter account. Perhaps you learned this when you read Chris Jones’ masterful Esquire profile earlier this year, or when Ebert’s very public loathing of the Tea Party movement came to a head a few months later in a particularly nasty exchange via the microblogging platform itself…

In my memory, he is smiling. His hair is blond, nearly as white as his teeth, and his skin is the color of peanut butter. His entire body is wrapped in iridescent blue spandex; it shimmers, but not so brightly as the silver rope trim and the rhinestones arranged in swirling galaxies across his broad chest.

In late August, certain events necessitated rather sudden changes in the way I make money. My first thought was, “I will become a freelance writer!” My second thought was, “Oh, but I know what happens to freelance writers?they write a lot for magazines that don’t always pay on time and then sometimes the magazines just disappear before they send out a check!”

It was a different kind of scary, so different that I don’t even know if it really qualifies as a horror movie, but my gut was clenched the whole time and Joe kept swatting my hands away from my face: “Don’t cover your eyes! Don’t cover your eyes!”

Brooke is 28 years old, lives in Atlanta and will never watch The Goonies. For many children of the 80s, Richard Donner’s 1985 kiddie adventure flick is a cultural touchstone, its hidden-treasure fueled romp through secret caves and the mire of pre-adolescence still wildly beloved to this day. But she really couldn’t care less.

Photos don’t tell the town’s whole story, I know, and they privilege those that were deemed appropriate to hold or be in front of a camera, but it’s an easy—and kind of addictive—way to look straight into the past.

Vera intended her work as a way to incorporate something beautiful and thoughtfully-rendered into everyday life, whether spread out on a breakfast table or covering a bed or knotted around a neck. Formally trained at New York City’s Cooper Union, she made “wearable art” at a time when that was either a novelty or a luxury…

Last week, the Decatur, Ga.-based music, film and culture magazine Paste announced that it was shuttering its print edition and sallying forth into the great digital future as a web-only publication—and, in the process, sloughing off its entire dozen-person staff. I was one of them.