The Fourth Protocol (almost)
How Legendary Spy Novelist Frederick Forsyth Learned He’d Been ‘Bowdlerized’
BY: LARRY TAUNTON
“Good morning. A pleasure to meet you. Please forgive my attire. A difficult night.”
Somewhat disheveled and wearing only a bathrobe and slippers, Frederick Forsyth greeted me from what I assumed to be a favorite armchair in his living room. I felt slightly envious of a man who had reached an age and level of success where he doesn’t care what people think about him and doesn’t need to care.
Crisp, unwrinkled copies of The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph sat neatly on an ottoman in front of him awaiting his inspection. With an unexpected display of strength, his 60-something personal assistant lifted a substantial chair off the floor and moved it close to her employer, inviting me to sit down before she withdrew to get us coffee.
“So what is required of me?” Forsyth began with a formality that belied his ensemble. “An interview, is it?”
Now 85, his impeccable English manners were on display and, once primed, so was his agile mind.
Frederick Forsyth must be considered one of the inventors of the modern thriller novel. The author of such bestsellers as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, and The Fourth Protocol, all major Hollywood productions, his career has spanned six decades, and with Eddie Redmayne set to play the Jackal in a television miniseries reboot of the 1971 novel-turned-film, his popularity shows no signs of slowing down, even if he does. To date, Forsyth has sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Up To Become Down, Left To Become Right?
The sun’s magnetic field is about to flip. Here’s what to expect.
The sun is on the verge of a significant event: a magnetic field reversal.
This phenomenon happens roughly every 11 years and marks an important stage in the solar cycle. The shift in polarity indicates the halfway point of solar maximum, the height of solar activity, and the beginning of the shift toward solar minimum.
The last time the sun‘s magnetic field flipped was toward the end of 2013. But what causes this switch in polarity, and is it dangerous? Let’s take a deep look at the sun’s magnetic field reversal and investigate the effects it could have on Earth.
To understand the magnetic field’s reversal, first, it’s important to be familiar with the solar cycle. This approximately 11-year cycle of solar activity is driven by the sun’s magnetic field and is indicated by the frequency and intensity of sunspots visible on the surface. The height of solar activity during a given solar cycle is known as solar maximum, and current estimates predict it will occur between late 2024 and early 2026.
Still Discovering…
Greek archaeologists discover mysterious 4,000-year-old building on hill earmarked for new airport
By the Associated Press
Greek Culture Ministry/AP
A big, round, 4,000-year-old stone building discovered on a Cretan hilltop is puzzling archaeologists and threatening to disrupt a major airport project on the Greek tourist island.
Greece’s Culture Ministry said Tuesday that the structure is a “unique and extremely interesting find” from Crete’s Minoan civilization, famous for its sumptuous palaces, flamboyant art and enigmatic writing system. Resembling a huge car wheel from above, the ruins of the labyrinthine, 1,800-square-meter (19,000-square-foot) building came to light during a recent dig by archaeologists.
The site was earmarked for a radar station to serve a new airport under construction near the town of Kastelli. Set to open in 2027, it’s projected to replace Greece’s second-biggest airport at Heraklion, and designed to handle up to 18 million travelers annually.
Wu-Tang Shkreli
Martin Shkreli Sued for Allegedly Copying One-of-a-Kind Wu-Tang Clan Album
The lawsuit alleges Shkreli played the music on social media and bragged about it.
The media-dubbed “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who served four years of a seven-year sentence in prison for securities fraud, is now facing a lawsuit alleging he copied the secret Wu-Tang Clan album he was forced to sell after his conviction.
Wu-Tang Clan, the pioneering hip-hop group formed on Staten Island in 1992, sold its album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (2015) to Shkreli for $2 million in a 2015 auction by Paddle8. It was seized by the U.S. government, which sold it to PleasrDAO, a collective of digital art enthusiasts and cryptocurrency investors, for $4.75 million in 2021.
The album, released as a single physical copy enclosed in a handcrafted silver and nickel case, stands as a unique artistic statement that challenges the commodification and mass production of music in the digital age and draws parallels to fine art, a field where scarcity enhances value and significance. When the album was sold to PleasrDAO, the ownership deed came in the form of an NFT.
The Big Whack
A Big Whack That Made the Moon May Have Also Created Continents That Move
by Lucas Joel
Some 4.5 billion years ago, many scientists say, Earth had a meetup with Theia, another planetary object the size of Mars. When the two worlds collided in a big whack, the thinking goes, debris shot into space, got locked into the orbit of the young, damaged Earth and led to the formation of our moon.
But the collision with Theia may have done more than that, according to a study published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The impact may have given rise to something else: plate tectonics, the engine that drives the motion of Earth’s giant continental and oceanic plates and causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the eventual remaking of our planet’s surface about every 200 million years.
A Residency In Portland
Sci-Fi Author Ursula Le Guin’s Portland Home Is Becoming a Writers Residency
Le Guin had a clear vision for her home to become a creative space for writers and a beacon for the literary community, according to Literary Arts director Andrew Proctor.
By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
A cozy second-floor studio in a three-story Portland home is where Ursula Le Guin, the late author renowned for her achievements in science fiction and fantasy, created seminal works like The Books of Earthsea, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin’s longtime home is now set to host other promising authors as it transforms into a new writers residency overseen by local nonprofit Literary Arts.
The family of Le Guin, who died in 2018 at age 88, donated the property to Literary Arts with the goal of celebrating and supporting historically underrepresented writers. “Although Ursula’s reputation is international, she focused much of energy on the local community of writers, libraries and literary organizations,” said the author’s son Theo Downes-Le Guin in a statement. “So it’s fitting that this residency, ambitious in the breadth of writers it will reach, will be rooted in the house and city she loved and lived in for more than a half-century.”
Next To Heaven
Who Is Anonymous, The Author Of Hot Book ‘Next To Heaven?’ Deadline Solves The Mystery As TV Rights Deal Closes With Publishing Pact Coming
By Mike Fleming Jr.
The novel Next to Heaven hit the market this week. Written by Anonymous, it’s a social satire that is being shopped by WME simultaneously for both a publishing deal and a TV deal. The TV deal has just closed, and the publishing deal will be next.
The rights to turn the book into a TV series were snapped up by former AGBO and Chernin executive Mike Larocca and Michael Schaefer for their as yet-unnamed production venture. They will produce with Entertainment 360’s Guymon Casady (Game of Thrones). Schaefer most recently ran New Regency and produced The Martian.
So, who is Anonymous?
Deadline sniffed out that it is James Frey, known for A Million Little Pieces and many other literary works. Actually, this was not like cracking the case of the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping. Lit scouts who read the novel quickly deciphered the mystery. Frey has a way with grammar and sentence structure that makes his works move at 60 mph, and those trademark flourishes were there.
In Next to Heaven, best friends Devon and Belle are the Queen Bees of super-affluent New Bethlehem, Connecticut (a town that suspiciously resembles Frey’s hometown of New Canaan). They are very beautiful, very rich and very bored, their marriages mostly business arrangements at this point. And so they decide to host a carefully curated, invitation-only swingers party. But later, when one of the invitees ends up dead, the stakes in their game turn out to be much higher than any of the guests could have anticipated.
AIgnore, No
Ray Kurzweil: AI Is Not Going to Kill You, But Ignoring It Might
We talk to the famed futurist about his new book, ‘The Singularity is Nearer,’ and why he’s doubling down on his prediction that humans will merge with machines by 2045.
Discussions about AI inevitably turn to the potential for disaster, but futurist Ray Kurzweil argues in his new book that focusing on the downsides will instead create “delays in overcoming human suffering.” Out June 25, The Singularity is Nearer is a follow-up to 2005’s The Singularity is Near, and offers updated data and new guidance on how humans can fully pursue AI without fear.
The book contains dozens of graphs intended to convince the naysayers that technology—including AI—has given us a far better life than our ancestors. Literacy rates are up while murder rates are down, democracy is more widespread, and the use of renewable energy is on the rise, according to Kurzweil, who warns against taking anti-AI sentiment too far.
“We need to take seriously the misguided and increasingly strident Luddite voices that advocate broad relinquishment of technological progress to avoid the genuine dangers of genetics, nanotechnology, and robots (GNR),” Kurzweil writes in The Singularity is Nearer.
Time For The Moon
Why scientists say we need to send clocks to the moon — soon
Perhaps the greatest, mind-bending quirk of our universe is the inherent trouble with timekeeping: Seconds tick by ever so slightly faster atop a mountain than they do in the valleys of Earth.
For practical purposes, most people don’t have to worry about those differences.
But a renewed space race has the United States and its allies, as well as China, dashing to create permanent settlements on the moon, and that has brought the idiosyncrasies of time, once again, to the forefront.
On the lunar surface, a single Earth day would be roughly 56 microseconds shorter than on our home planet — a tiny number that can lead to significant inconsistencies over time.
NASA and its international partners are currently grappling with this conundrum.
Camp 6200 B.C.
A 8,200-Year-Old Campsite Was Found on a U.S. Air Force Base in New Mexico
Geomorphologists made the chance discovery while driving past a roadcut.
Two researchers have stumbled upon an 8,200-year-old campsite formerly covered by sand dunes at the Holloman Air Force Base just outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
While driving past the side of a roadcut, the geomorphologists from the University of Arizona noticed “an unusual rock sticking out,” a spokesperson from the base explained over email. Upon closer inspection, the duo realized the rock might be an artifact, and contacted Matthew Cuba, the 49th Civil Engineer Squadron cultural resource manager. Cuba and his team unearthed “a significant and well-preserved site” over six feet beneath the earth, according to the base’s source.
“The formation of the white sand dunes inadvertently buried the site, with windblown silt protecting the delicate archaeological remains,” Cuba remarks in this week’s release “This site marks a pivotal moment in shedding light on the area’s history and its early inhabitants.”
Anora d’Or
Cannes Film Festival: ‘Anora’ Wins Palme d’Or; ‘All We Imagine As Light’ Takes Grand Prize; ‘Emilia Perez’ Jury Prize & Best Actress Ensemble – Full List
Sean Baker’s New York-set romantic dramedy Anora has scooped the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. This marked Baker’s second time in the competition after 2021’s Red Rocket, and tonight’s win amounted to the realization of what Baker said has been his “singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years.”
Anora stars Mikey Madison as a stripper from Brooklyn who transforms into a modern Cinderella when she meets the son of a Russian oligarch. Complications arise when his parents find out and try to get the marriage annulled.
In his review, Deadline’s Damon Wise called it “a high-decibel screwball comedy… that accelerates at speed, cruises at high altitude for a surprisingly long time, then comes back down to Earth with a deeply affecting and almost unbearably melancholy coda that sends the audience out in silence.”
Taco Art
One of the most unusual heists in America seems to be unfolding at Taco Bell
‘They made it sound like they were talking about the Mona Lisa’
When artist Mark Smith stepped off the plane from New York and arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, on that fateful day in the early 2000s, he knew he was about to enter one of the most important critiques of his entire career.
But Smith wasn’t doing a studio visit with the owners of a prestigious gallery — he was meeting with the corporate executives of Taco Bell, the California fast food chain that peddles Crunchwrap Supremes and Baja Blasts to the masses.
This was back in 2002 or 2003, before the company even created these artificial masterpieces. At the time, Smith was trying to convince them to let him make three paintings that would eventually get rolled out to most, if not all, Taco Bell locations in the U.S. At first, not everyone in the room was onboard with the concept because it was so expensive: It would require making prints of his Basquiat-like paintings, stretching them on canvas and then hanging them in each store to make them feel like real art as opposed to ubiquitous branded messaging.
But, against these odds, Smith got the green light of approval, and the pieces were distributed in 2003. Over the course of his expansive career, he’s been commissioned to work on projects for major clients like Absolut Vodka, DaimlerChrysler and the Olympics, cementing his status as a professional artist. Life went on, and the trio of paintings faded into memory.
Nasty
‘Nasty’: Watch Trailer For Cannes World Premiere Documentary On Ilie Nastase, A Tennis Bad Boy Before John McEnroe Ever Cursed An Ump
Days before the start of the French Open in Paris, there’s going to be some tennis action at the Cannes Film Festival – with one of the greatest players ever.
Thursday will mark the world premiere of Nasty, a documentary about the brilliant Romanian pro Ilie Nastase – who at the height of his career was one of the most gifted, entertaining, and polarizing figures in sport.
Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu and Tudor D. Popescu directed the film, which debuts in the Special Screenings section of Cannes. Goodfellas is handling international sales as part of its new sports-focused sales label, Oui Michel. We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.
Demi On Nudity
Demi Moore defends nudity and gore in ‘insane’ Cannes film with 100% Rotten Tomatoes score
Demi Moore has defended the extreme violence, nudity, and body horror in her shocking Cannes film that has received the festival’s longest ovation.
The Substance, directed by Revenge creator Coralie Fargeat, premiered at the French festival yesterday, with many lauding the Ghost actor’s, 61, performance.
Yet to receive a UK release date, the Palme d’Or contender sees Demi star as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading Hollywood actor whose career is at risk of being axed until she discovers an experimental medical procedure to combat ageing.
The all-star cast is rounded out by Margaret Qualley, Hugo Diego Garcia, and Dennis Quaid, who replaced Ray Liotta in the film following his death aged 67 in 2022.
They’re Coming!
Watch moment giant meteor travelling at 1,700mph turns night sky blue over Spain and Portugal in rare spectacle
by Sayan Bose,
INCREDIBLE footage captured the moment a comet travelling at 1,700mph lit up the night sky in a rare spectacle.
Stargazers were left stunned as the fireball shot turned the pitch-black sky into greenish blue in parts of Spain and Portugal.
Amazing footage captured by the dashcam of a car in Portugal shows a dazzling blue-coloured fireball-shaped object with a long tail falling from the sky.
Within moments, the blazing object explodes to paint the entire sky in the shade of blue.
A different footage captured by the European Space Agency (ESA) showed the object illuminating the sky over the western Spanish city of Caceres into hues of blue and green.
Re-animator For Real
Maverick surgeon wants to transplant living human head onto dead body
After critics in the US objected to his plan to graft a living human head onto the body of a recently-deceased donor, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero moved to China – but then his volunteer fell in love
A maverick surgeon says the ground-breaking operation of transplanting the head of a terminally-ill man onto a recently deceased donor is around the corner.
Many medical experts have weighed in to criticise the work of Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. Among them is bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, from Emory University in the US, who said that Canavero’s so-called HEAVEN procedure “Walks a fine line between medical care and murder.”
Canavero had planned to perform the risky procedure on Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a rare muscle-wasting disease. But while legal challenges in the US delayed the surgery, two major changes occurred in Spiridonov’s life.
Naked Wellness Cool
Estonia’s naked wellness tradition to cleanse both body and soul
By Hillary Millán
Used for centuries by rural Estonians to heal their aches and pains, smoke saunas are a soulful experience that clears the mind and cleanses the spirit.
It’s an uncommonly sunny March afternoon in Estonia but I’m in the dark cocoon of a smoke sauna, lying on a bench, completely naked. My feet are propped up on a sooty wooden beam and my head rests on a viht. This small bundle of thin oak branches is meant for lashing my bare body to slough off dead skin cells and boost circulation, but for the moment, it’s a pillow. The dried leaves are pliant, though, after being soaked in water. Their earthy smell and the tang of smoke fill my nostrils. The air is damp, and beads of sweat cover my body.
Eda Veeroja, the owner of Mooska Smoke Sauna, is also naked. She drizzles water onto hot rocks piled on top of the brick stove. “Olen tuul üle väljade… Sind hoian, hoian endas [I am the wind across the fields… I hold you, I hold you]” she sings, the tune like a lullaby, the words hanging in the air like leil, the steam rising off the rocks.
Amenhotep the Rich
Meet the ‘richest man who ever lived’: Scientists recreate the face of Tutankhamun’s grandfather, Amenhotep III, for the first time in 3,400 years
By SHIVALI BEST
He ruled ancient Egypt at the height of its powers, was worshipped as a living god, and was the grandfather of Tutankhamun.
And now the true face of Amenhotep III has been revealed.
The pharaoh, described by one archaeologist as ‘one of the richest men that ever lived’, led Egypt through a period of unprecedented prosperity and international power.
He’s considered one of the greatest pharaohs and has more surviving statues than any other, yet a scientific reconstruction of his face had never been made.
Now, using data from the skull of his mummy, a multinational team has revealed his true likeness for the first time in almost 3,400 years.
Go Go Malinois!
Pope Francis Digs Aliens
Pope to hold press conference on aliens and the supernatural – and people are confused
The last time the Vatican held a press conference about aliens and ‘supernatural phenomena’ was in February 1978, but what would tomorrow’s event mean for The Pope?
By Adam Cailler
The Vatican has announced that it is set to hold a press conference on “supernatural phenomena” tomorrow, and it will touch on aliens and how it will deal with potential encounters in the future.
According to a notice on the Vatican’s website, it will kick of at noon tomorrow, and will feature three prominent Vatican members.
Being held to “present the new provisions of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith for discerning between apparitions and other supernatural phenomena,” it will be led by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandex, Messenger Armando Matteo and Daniela Del Gaudio.
Radioactive Stinkbug
No-No Dock Ellis
Poochapalooza
The Wacky and Wonderful World of the Westminster Dog Show
A canine campaign can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention all the brushing, trimming, blow-drying, and styling products. Did you think it was easy being top dog?
ernard de Menthon was born around the year 1000, near what is now the border of Switzerland and France. He was raised in a castle, given a first-class education, and, in time, affianced by his father to a noblewoman, as befit the scion of an ancient and wealthy family. By then, however, de Menthon had grown into a pious young man whose plans for the future did not include marriage. According to legend, the night before the wedding, he fled the castle by jumping out of a high window, whereupon a band of angels caught him and lowered him gently to the ground.
Ordained as a priest, de Menthon began preaching in villages throughout the region of Aosta, a territory that included a mountain pass already in use for at least a thousand years to cross the Western Alps. In de Menthon’s day, it was a popular route for Christians making the pilgrimage to Rome, but the journey was perilous. Bands of brigands routinely staked out the area to attack travellers, the pass itself was harrowing—eight thousand feet high, buried in snow, prone to avalanches—and de Menthon often found himself ministering to travellers who had been subjected to its terrors. And so, when he became the archdeacon of Aosta, he established a hospice in the pass, staffed by monks who offered aid to pilgrims venturing over the mountains.
At first, the hospice simply provided food, shelter, and a reminder to people inclined to make trouble that they did so under the watchful eye of God, or, anyway, of the godly. Over time, though, the monks began dispatching search parties to recover the missing. No one knows exactly when those search parties first began bringing along dogs, but by the early seventeen-hundreds the search parties were dogs—clever, indefatigable creatures capable of smelling a body under twenty feet of snow, who patrolled the area unaccompanied by humans. They generally travelled in pairs, so that, if they found someone too sick or hurt to move, one dog could return to the hospice to summon help while the other stayed behind, lying down atop the stricken person to offer warmth and hope. At some point, the hospice started keeping track of those rescues; by 1897, when one dog found a boy who had nearly frozen to death after falling into a crevasse, the dogs were known to have saved some two thousand people. Also by then, the long-dead Bernard de Menthon had been canonized, which is why the pass, the hospice, and the dogs themselves are all known today by the name St. Bernard.
Gorier and Gorier
Roger Corman interview: ‘Horror today just gets gorier and gorier’
The grand old man of B movies on discovering Coppola and Scorsese, making Jack Nicholson cry, and the problem with modern horror
by Tim Robey, FILM CRITIC
Roger Corman, director and producer of hundreds of films including 1960’s Little Shop of Horrors, has died aged 98. In this 2013 interview from The Telegraph’s archives, he spoke candidly about his long career, and the state of contemporary horror cinema.
At 87 years old, Roger Corman is a twinkly gent. He walks with a pronounced stoop, and speaks in careful, precise sentences, making considerable effort not to waste a word. It’s hard to believe the career this benign legend has had, not to mention the careers he’s given others – he gave Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Fonda, Jonathan Demme.
Along the way, Corman has written a handful of films, directed 56, had a couple of dozen, mostly uncredited acting cameos, and produced, in some capacity, about 400 movies. The titles include some of the most wonderfully lurid in film history – take 1957’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, or The Wasp Woman (1959), or Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977). Astonishingly, he’s still working – something called Dance with a Vampyre would appear to be in production now – though he hasn’t directed a film himself since 1990’s Frankenstein Unbound.
Roger Corman Gone
Roger Corman, Giant of Independent Filmmaking, Dies at 98
The fabled “King of the B’s” producer and director influenced the careers of Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and many others.
Roger Corman, the fabled “King of the B’s” producer and director who churned out low-budget genre films with breakneck speed and provided career boosts to young, untested talents like Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Gale Anne Hurd and James Cameron, has died. He was 98.
The filmmaker, who received an honorary Oscar in 2009 at the Governors Awards, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, his family told The Hollywood Reporter.
Corman perhaps is best known for such horror fare as The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and his series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, but he became celebrated for drugs-and-biker sagas like The Wild Angels (1966), which was invited to the Venice Film Festival as the Premiere Presentation.
He also achieved notoriety for producing The Trip (1967), which starred Peter Fonda as a man on an LSD-inspired odyssey. Its controversy delighted Corman, who was one of the first producers to recognize the power of negative publicity.
Toadzac
Could a toad’s psychedelic venom be the next big anti-depressant?
by Hiyah Zaidi
A hallucinogenic toad’s venom could be a new form of anti-depressant, scientists say.
The Colorado River toad, also known as the Sonoran Desert toad, has psychedelic venom just below the surface, which they secrete through their glands when it is scared.
And although it is well known that this toad’s venom can cause intense hallucinations and trippy experiences, until now scientists have been unsure how exactly it influences the brain.
But a recent study has found that the toad’s hallucinogenic compound could be the basis of a new antidepressant.
AI Frey
James Frey: “I use artificial intelligence because I want to write the best book possible.”
James Frey is on holiday with his children by a lake in Wisconsin. Against this bucolic backdrop, the American writer with shaved head is lost in thought, working his chewing gum vigorously. He strikes the nonchalant attitude of someone who pays no heed to what others might think: writer, rebel, junkie, entrepreneur, subversive, pariah or genius. If the writer triggers such mixed feelings, it is undoubtedly because his arrival twenty years ago on the literary scene caused a stir like no other. Back in 2004, this Bukowski and Henry Miller fan from a good family who fantasised about being an outlaw burst riotously into the literary world with A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday Books), a brutal autobiography describing his struggle with drug addiction and alcoholism in a rehab centre. Hailed as one of the most visceral explorations of addiction, the work was admired by Gus van Sant, Bret Easton Ellis and Pat Conroy who deemed the account the “War and Peace of addiction”. A seismic shock, rarely seen in literature, selling ten million copies worldwide. Then as an investigative website asserted that many parts of his memoirs had been invented, his house of cards came tumbling down. The American media went wild, the author apologised, his agent dropped him, as did his publisher, and lawsuits piled up. Insulted, hunted down, the writer became the first target for what is now known as cancel culture.
Steve Albini Gone
Steve Albini Dies: Nirvana Producer Was 61
By Greg Evans
Steve Albini, a singer and guitarist best known for producing some of the most groundbreaking and influential albums of the alt-rock genre, died of a heart attack at his Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio. He was 61.
Albini’s death and cause of death was confirmed by Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio.
Born July 22, 1962, in Pasadena, Albini moved to the Chicago area after high school to study journalism at Northwestern University. While there, he began writing for local punk rock ‘zines and beginning to record and engineer albums for local bands.
Stubbornly opposed to the larger music industry and its exploitation of artists, Albini formed the Chicago-based band Big Black in 1981, recording the first of several albums, an EP for the Chicago label Ruthless Records, a label he co-managed. That band last until 1987.