Sublime

William Vollmann, whose collection The Rainbow Stories

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

Justin Timberlake and Robert De Niro were the guests on our first real show. Once again, this was a stroke of brilliance from Lorne: he booked De Niro because he wanted a very difficult guest interview for Jimmy. He knew that the press would be relentless regardless, so he figured that he might as well give them a reason.

argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”1

The online world was his stage; he just needed to decide who would come out from behind the curtain.

The metamorphosis from rash young newbie to jaded old-timer had happened slowly.