Bret

Bret Easton Ellis, 58, is the author of nine books, most recently White (2019), a memoir of culture and politics that describes, among other things, the impact of reading Thomas Tryon’s violent 1971 horror classic The Other when he was seven years old. Speaking from home in Los Angeles, where he’s currently at work on a mock true-crime audio show with Irvine Welsh, he calls his new book, The Shards – a high-school mystery first serialised on his podcast – “a Bret Easton Ellis novel for people who don’t like Bret Easton…

The shocks come fast in Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years: The Shards is prefaced by a sweetly sincere – or is it? – thank you note from the notoriously misanthropic author “for your support over the past four decades… I’m more appreciative than you’ll ever know”. The story proper begins with the audacious ruse of “Bret Easton Ellis” looking metafictionally back across time at the defining events that befell him and his friends in the autumn of 1981, during their final year in high school. Bret acknowledges the…

Each episode of Bret Easton Ellis’s long-running podcast begins with a monologue – sometimes a review, sometimes a mildly provocative essay, pillorying the culture’s supposed new puritans. His opening in September 2020 felt different. For 20 years, Ellis said, he’d been haunted by a book he longed to write but was terrified to begin: a memoir of sorts, detailing “what happened to me, and a few of my friends, one year at the end of high school”. His last false start – a few rough pages written with “trembling hands”,…

Mr. Taylor, 42, will vacate the position Jan. 31, Salesforce said Wednesday. Mr. Benioff will become sole chief executive again and continue to serve as company chairman. The departure comes amid growing challenges for the tech industry in areas, such as cloud-computing software, that thrived during the pandemic. Salesforce announced the leadership change Wednesday along with its quarterly earnings. The company posted higher revenue in the latest quarter, citing customer demand against a challenging economic backdrop.…

As one half of New Zealand’s self-proclaimed “fourth-most-popular guitar-based digi-bongo a cappella-rap-funk-comedy duo” and a composer of tunes from the likes of the Muppets and the Simpsons, Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie is best known for singing songs laden with jokes. It might come as a surprise to some, then, that his debut solo album – released earlier this year – offers quite the opposite experience. Titled, categorically, Songs Without Jokes, it’s a collection of road trip-ready rock numbers inspired by…

This image gives me hives.Photo: Richard Drew/Associated Press | Screenshot: New York TimesBret Stephens, the New York Times columnist with a long history of bad conservative takes—the same man who decided to quit Twitter after he threw a fit over being called a bedbug—says he’s changed. In an essay for the Times opinion section published Friday, Stephens claims that a visit to Greenland changed his mind on climate change, but the uniquely infuriating essay is still full of Stephens-style bullshit, horrible design choices…

Screenshot: Warner Bros. AnimationEven among the select group of 40-something nerds who cherish even the awful content of our youths, there are not many who remember the short-lived cartoon Turbo Teen. This is a good thing. Its premise was lazy at best—a teen named Bret who can transform into a sports car—and executed horrifically, as Bret’s body shatters and stretches into a nightmare that eventually becomes a car. It looks like some Hellraiser Cenobite torture experiment. But hey, see for yourself: Gif: Warner Bros.…

When he was “around 14”, Bret McKenzie became obsessed with the Leonard Cohen album I’m Your Man. Its synth-heavy tales of geopolitics, romantic devotion and the poems of Federico García Lorca made it an unusual choice for a pubescent boy in suburban New Zealand. Nevertheless, at school, he and his friends would happily sing along to tracks such as Jazz Police and First We Take Manhattan when passing between lessons.As they sang, McKenzie listened to the voices of his peers, plumbing Cohen’s baritone depths. Meanwhile his…

Poison was set to perform alongside Def Leppard, Motley Crüe and Joan Jett at the Nashville stop of their joint stadium tour on Thursday night, but the band pulled out after frontman Bret Michaels was taken to the hospital. The Nashville Tennessean reported that members from Poison stepped onstage to let the Nissan Stadium audience know that Michaels was hospitalized and would not be able to perform. No further details on his condition were given. Fans took to Twitter to seemingly confirm the hospitalization,…

Poison frontman Bret Michaels was forced to cancel a performance in Nashville on Thursday “due to an unforeseen medical complication” that led to hospitalization.The 59-year-old rocker, who has been touring with Poison as well as Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, was set to take the stage at the Nissan Stadium, but he and his group had to pull out minutes before showtime, according to the Tennessean. His Poison bandmates took to the stage to break the news and the show went on as planned.“To the…