The day starts well enough: no hangover, no fighting before bedtime, no crying from the nursery, no staring through the darkness at indeterminate hours wondering in what direction, if any, my life is headed.

Dear Drunkspin,

My wife recently gave birth to a healthy baby boy that we named Ellis. He is a prodigious eater and likes a warm bath. (We have experimented both with a white foam tub and a mesh blue one that resembles a patio chair. I prefer the latter on all counts with the exception of its aquatic-themed design, which is insulting…

Lately, when I find that the noise in my head has gotten a little too loud, I retreat to a corner of the website for a Belgian brewery called De Proefbrouwerij. I like looking at that clean, white machine, those blue, digital readouts: Something sanitary is being done here, something beyond the sweaty reach of human…

First off, let me introduce myself: My name is Mike, and I have been given the dubious honor of being named Drunkspin's West Coast Beer Correspondent, which means that every now and then you'll see some writing on a beer that Will Gordon either can't get up in Massachusetts, or can't, like, get up in Massachusetts.…

Another year, another February; another parade of dogs coming to a gray and bitter New York in hopes of winning the big ribbon at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Of all this year's upsets, few were as touching as the toppling of Flessner's International S'Cess, a handsome bloodhound from Maryland who won Best…

This past June, I got married. It was one of the best days of my life, and I hope to never have to experience it again. As anyone who has been through one knows, weddings are a deeply magical experience festooned with deeply unmagical questions: inside or outside? Who pays for what? Is beet salad an "appropriate"…

Young Thug is a rapper from Atlanta who has never released an official full-length album and, at this rate, may not for a long time. His mixtapes—both alone and with collaborators—have been daring and unusual, bundles of promises that haven't quite come to bear. Until about two weeks ago, he had produced one…

In 1982, Robin Williams went on a Dallas-area talk show to discuss his title role in the film adaptation of John Irving's novel The World According to Garp. The show's host—a cheerful, robotic woman named Bobbie Wygant—asks her questions, and Williams provides his answers.

Like a lot of boys growing up in the early 1990s, I was fascinated by the hard-rock band Metallica. What drew me was no mystery. They were dark and powerful and commanded the respect of millions. I was nine and lived in fear of having to undress for swim PE. The gap between us was impossible. For years, I didn't even…