Media & entertainment

The Motown machine: how one Detroit label ran an assembly line of number-one hits

Berry Gordy borrowed the logic of the car factory to manufacture hit after hit, building a Black-owned music empire that defined a decade of American sound.

12 min

Payola: how the hits you grew up on were secretly bought onto the radio

For decades, labels quietly paid to get songs played, shaping what became popular — the scandals, the laws, and the clever ways the practice never really died.

12 min

How K-pop was engineered as a national export and conquered the world

Behind the polish is a deliberate system of training, financing, and cultural strategy — how South Korea turned pop music into a global soft-power machine.

12 min

The Amen break: how six seconds of a 1969 drum solo built modern music

One short drum break became the rhythmic backbone of hip-hop, jungle, and dance music worldwide, while the drummer who played it lived and died with almost nothing to show for it.

12 min

Disco Demolition Night: the stadium riot that ended an era

A 1979 promotion to blow up disco records turned into a field-storming riot — and beneath the spectacle was a backlash tangled up with race, sexuality, and who pop music was for.

12 min

How Marvel went bankrupt, sold off its heroes, and clawed back to own cinema

Near collapse in the 1990s, Marvel licensed away Spider-Man and the X-Men for cash, then bet everything on making its own films — and built the most dominant franchise in movie history.

12 min

How a teenager's app called Napster nearly destroyed the music industry

Napster let anyone copy any song for free almost overnight, gutting record sales, triggering a wave of lawsuits, and forcing the entire industry to reinvent how music is sold.

12 min

Apocalypse Now and the shoot that became its own descent into madness

A typhoon, a heart attack, a director gambling his fortune, and a set that mirrored the war it was filming — how one production nearly consumed everyone in it.

12 min