May 9, 2013 – Cassettes may be a relic of the pre-digital era, but there are a few places in this country where those unloved plastic tapes are holding on strong. Although many corrections departments are tiptoeing cautiously into the digital future by introducing MP3 players to their inmate populations (see our feature on the subject), at prisons in New York and Illinois (as well as some facilities in other states), the only way an offender can listen to music is on a cassette ordered from an approved vendor.Pack Central, operated by owner Bob Paris, is one such company. Paris ran the mail-order department for a record store in Van Nuys, California, in the '70s, and noticed he was sending a lot of packages into prisons.

May 9, 2013 – If you've got to go to prison, you could do a lot worse than the Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino. The 574-inmate facility is tucked into a picturesque valley on the state's rugged northern panhandle, along the trail once blazed by Lewis and Clark. The thin window slits in many of the general-population cells on the prison's newest section — called "A Block" — offer views of the surrounding green-brown foothills and pine forests, as well as the crisp rushing waters of the Clearwater River, a world-renowned fly-fishing spot. Despite its northerly latitude and the snow-capped mountains not too far in the distance, the weather here remains reasonably mild year-round.

May 1, 2013 – PJ Harvey has a walloping, 50-foot-tall legacy — musicially and emotionally raw when stadium angst was a boys club; opening the door for everyone from Alanis to Karen O. But in 1993, PJ Harvey was the name of a band: bassist Steve Vaughan, drummer Rob Ellis, and frontwoman Polly Jean Harvey, who would soon after come to be known as "PJ Harvey" regardless of whom she played with.

February 25, 2013 – It's easy to forget just how weird the landscape of popular music was in the early-to-mid-'90s. The success of bands like R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and especially Nirvana had convinced major labels that "alternative" was the next big thing, and those labels decided they had to start signing bands that could fit the bill. But major-label conceptions of "alternative" turned out to mean anything from Better Than Ezra to Butt Trumpet.

December 14, 2012 – In the early dawn hours of January 20, 2012, in a small village on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, heavily armed police (with help from an FBI logistics team) descended on the lavish mansion owned by Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. With his hulking 6-foot-7-inch, 300-plus-pound frame, his collection of firearms, his young model wife, his fleet of luxury automobiles — complete with vanity license plates reading "HACKER," "GUILTY," "MAFIA," and "GOD," among other things — plus his penchant for ostentatiously displaying all of the above, Dotcom always had seemed more like a comic-book villain than an Internet entrepreneur, and the fuzz arrived that morning as if they expected Lex Luthor. There were two helicopters, teams of police dogs, and 76 officers, many toting semi-automatic weapons.

November 29, 2012 – Sgt. Josh Hartman is in the backseat of his Humvee as it hurtles down Route Predators in Baghdad. Route Predators is the military's name for what is officially known as Highway 5, a three-mile stretch of road in the eastern part of the city lined with dilapidated cinder-block buildings and littered with ungainly piles of scrap metal, used tires, and other hiding spots for improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. A trip down Route Predators is an unbelievably tense, white-knuckle ride: It's technically a "black road," which means it's too dangerous for military vehicles to traverse, but it's rainy season and the only other path available is a big field that's currently so muddy it's impassable. Hartman sees the flash first, a split-second before he hears and feels the skull-rattling boom. There's no time to react.

September 27, 2012 – This is what it's come to. When a man isn't listed in the phone book, when he doesn't respond to emails or letters, when nobody seems to know how to find him, sometimes you just have to roll up to his last known address and holler at him. Literally."Mr. Gibson! Mr. Gibson!"It's 11 o'clock on a Thursday morning and Ken Shipley is standing on the sidewalk outside a tidy, one-story brick house in the Carrollton section of New Orleans. Hands cupped around the sides of his mouth, he's trying to summon Joe Gibson from what may or may not be his home. Shipley surely would've preferred knocking on the door or ringing the bell, but the small home is separated from the street by not one, but two, locking wrought-iron gates."Mr. Gibson! Anyone home?"In the early 1970s, Gibson wrote and produced two 45s by a group called the Soul Emotions, which featured his three young daughters.

August 16, 2012 – Dan Gillis has worked many jobs in his life. He's fronted cover bands, he taught at a high school in Maine, and he's driven a truck for a company run by an ex-con who later died, surrounded by hookers and cocaine, in a Nashville hotel room. Between 1995 and 2006, Gillis was Steve Earle's manager. These days, he drives tour buses. "When I was in college, my mother always told me, 'Dan, get your education to fall back on,'" he says. "Well, I always fall back on driving a bus because it's the thing I love to do more than anything." Gillis, 55, is tall and friendly. When I meet him on a warm day in early May, he's on his bus, a gorgeous, fully-loaded, silver 2012 Prevost XLII that retails for about $1 million. It's parked in a spacious lot in the upscale Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead.

May 9, 2012 – The park at the corner of 23rd Avenue and G Street in the Vedado section of Havana isn't much to look at by the standards of fading, crumbling glory that prevail in Cuba's capital city. In fact, it's less a park than a median that bisects the wide expanse of G Street: some patches of green grass, a few paved walkways, and maybe a half-dozen benches, all within about 100 square feet. At 1 a.m. on a warm, windy Friday night in mid-March, the park is a sea of long, dark hair and black concert T-shirts — Slayer, Bathory, Gorgoroth, Megadeth. I've been led here by Amed "Helheim" Olivares, frontman for Abaddon, a young band that, hours earlier, had played a relentless, assaultive 45-minute set at an Art Deco cinema a few blocks away during the first night of the third annual 666 Fest, a weekend-long celebration of Cuban black metal.

March 15, 2012 – Justin Hawkins, frontman for recently reunited hard rockers, the Darkness, has lived a life that has simultaneously conformed to and satirized just about every cliché rock 'n' roll has to offer. He formed the band over a decade ago with his guitarist brother Dan, and rose to prominence singing wonderful, flamboyant, cheeky odes to love, jealousy and genital warts and performing them decked out in full-body spandex catsuits while occasionally riding a stuffed white tiger. The band's 2003 debut, Permission to Land, made them huge stars in the U.K. and Hawkins reveled in playing the part: He indulged in food, drink and drugs, talked shit about other rock stars, and engaged in an on-again, off-again relationship with the band's female manager that caused problems within the band.