Few US presidents have done enough of any significance once they were out of office to rate books devoted to their post–White House careers. Nixon had Monica Crowley to play Boswell-that-ends-well, Jimmy Carter’s life and good works after 1981 will certainly deserve a fat tome or two, and I’d buy art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s (a guy can dream) George W. Bush: The Painter of Modern Life in an eyeblink. As usual, though, Bill Clinton is sui generis, comparable only to Teddy Roosevelt in his outsize presence and ongoing political impact sixteen years after his presidency. Hence Joe Conason’s nicely

Spoiler alert: I made the Big Fucking Steak. Of course I did. Because of all the recipes in Anthony Bourdain’s new cookbook, Appetites (Ecco, $38), it has the most Bourdainian recipe title, stamped in huge letters at the top of the page and preceded by a photo spread of an enormous dog in profile, jaws wide open and teeth glistening, about to pounce on a piece of raw meat. “Big Fucking Steak” is more like a mini-lecture than a recipe. It doesn’t tell you what cut of meat to buy (“look for marbling”). It doesn’t tell you what cooking method to use (Bourdain is agnostic when it comes to grilling

By nearly all accounts, Rio de Janeiro’s Summer Olympics were not as bad as they could have been. In spite of green pool water, Ryan Lochte’s lies, and terrible American TV ratings, there were a lot of people who made a lot of money. Brazillionaires, a recent journalistic account of Brazil’s billionaire class, is a capable and thorough examination of the kinds of Brazilians who profited from the Games. The book chronicles the accumulation, entrenchment, maintenance, and expansion of the country’s largest fortunes and business empires.

Take, for example, billionaire landowner Carlos Carvalho.

Advice is so much more enjoyable to give than it is to receive that its long flourishing as a genre—from the conduct books and periodicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the current plethora of columns, livechats, and podcasts—could seem mysterious. Of course, watching other people being told what to do might be the most fun of all, which surely helps account for the enduring appeal of the advice column, and explains why living online seems only to enhance that appeal. Yet the genre is also unusual in the opportunities it offers a writer, in its combination of surprise and

On a Saturday evening in July 2013, just before 6:30, James Rhodes was recorded on a surveillance camera walking into a Metro PCS cellphone store in Jacksonville, Fla. He was wearing a black do-rag and a blue bandanna, which he pulled over his nose and mouth. Shelby Farah, the store manager, stood behind the counter. Rhodes pointed a gun at her and demanded the money in the cash register. Shelby gave it to him. Then Rhodes shot her in the head. She was 20 years old. He was 21.

It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. For a certain kind of person, at any rate — ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was.