Rolling Stone’s Top 25 Deep Dives, Investigations, and Profiles of 2023

In 2018, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus got together to record a quick seven-inch to promote a joint tour. Five years later, we finally got to hear their full-length debut as the supergroup boygenius, one of the best albums of the year. In this February cover story, staff writer Angie Martoccio hung out with the supergroup in Los Angeles, diving deep into ‘The Record’ and the trio’s intense camaraderie that proved to be so productive for them as musicians, and irresistible to fans. What she found was three incredible, connected artists, and was able to convey their intimate banter on the page in a way that elucidated the deep friendships at the heart of the band. “We’re obsessed with each other,” Bridgers told Rolling Stone. “I like myself better around them.”

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From 1963 to 2020, there were three federal executions. But in the final six months of his administration, President Donald Trump approved the killing of 13 federal inmates — including six after he’d lost the election. In this feature, Asawin Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis talked to friends and lawyers of some of the people who were put to death, and looked into the crimes and legal processes that landed them on death row. They also dove into several of the untold, darkest chapters of what Suebsaeng and Reis describe as Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr’s “blitz of executions” during his last months in office — a killing spree that, Barr told them, began after a single conversation between him and Trump on the grisly topic.

This could seem like a terrifying moment we have passed, but it’s one to worry about in the future, too — while the executions were mostly paused under President Biden, that could all change if Trump is reelected in 2024. “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said, announcing his campaign in November 2022. “Because it is the only way.”

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Sexual assault often goes unpunished — according to best estimates, two out of three rapes aren’t even reported. But a group of women, who all claim to have been assaulted by the same man, took the matter into their own hands after they say authorities failed to act. For this feature, senior writer Alex Morris spent time with the women and heard both their stories of alleged assault, as well as their journey of finding each other — and trying to find justice. The individual has denied all the allegations, and told Rolling Stone that he was the target of a smear campaign, but that hasn’t slowed the women down. “There was a general feeling of ‘Something fucked up happened to me,’” one of the women told Rolling Stone. “But we were all making excuses for him. We were all like, ‘Maybe we’re overhyping this. Maybe we’re being dramatic.’ Once we all started talking, it was easier to see, ‘Holy crap. I’ve actually been through an amazing amount of trauma.’”

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It’s no secret that over the past couple of years, Twitter (now X) has devolved from merely terrible to truly, mind-numbingly awful. Sure, a lot of that has to do with Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover, but you could also credit the rise of particularly noxious accounts, including that of @catturd2. In this meticulously reported feature, staff writer Miles Klee dove into the account, poring through years of tweets (dating back to 2018, when the account first joined the platform) and his own self-published work (as well of that of one of his ex wives), trying to figure out how an anonymous 50-something Florida man posting poop jokes became a favorite among luminaries like Donald Trump, Jack Posobiec, and Musk himself. “What seemed to help [@catturd2] quickly amass MAGA connections and clout,” Klee writes, “was a rude and irreverent approach to American political circus.”

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Live are certainly not the first band to disintegrate amid legal battles — but as senior writer Andy Greene found after a months-long look into the tangled state of the band, they are certainly one of the more dramatic examples. Started by a group of four teenage friends in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, the band went on to become one of the biggest players in the 1990s alt-rock boom, and later staged a series of successful reunions in the mid-2010s. But shortly after the pandemic hit, the band found themselves in pieces. In this feature, Greene traces the wildly conflicting stories of founding guitarist Chad Taylor and drummer Chad Gracey, and their former business partner Bill Hynes, to find out what really happened to Live.

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Investigative entertainment reporter Cheyenne Roundree spoke with 13 cast and crew members for a behind-the-scenes look at the set of The Idol, producer Sam Levinson’s new show for HBO. What she found was a “shitshow,” according to her sources — a show that was supposed to skewer the sleaziness of Hollywood instead becoming one of its worst examples.

“What I signed up for was a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century,” one production member told Rolling Stone. “The things that we subject our talent and stars to, the forces that put people in the spotlight and how that can be manipulated in the post-Trump world…. It went from satire to the thing it was satirizing.”  

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Lisa Marie Presley’s life was marked by tragedy and turmoil — the death of her father, Elvis Presley, in 1977, when she was only nine; years of substance dependency; short-lived marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicholas Cage; the loss of her son, Ben; the struggle to separate herself from her very famous father — but it came to an end on Jan. 12, 2023, when she experienced cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California, and died later that day in a nearby hospital. In the weeks after her death, senior writer David Browne talked with those who had spent time with her, from musicians and producers she’d worked with to close friends who had been with her not long before they lost her, to create a vivid portrait of a complicated, talented, and intensely charismatic woman gone too soon.

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Who really is Andrew Tate? In this months-long investigation, EJ Dickson, Adam Rawnsley, and Stefania Matache detailed both the legend he has built around himself, as well as the reality that exists underneath. They talked to friends, acquaintances, and former romantic partners of Tate and his brother Tristan, pored through legal documents in the human trafficking case the two are facing in Romania (they deny the charges), and scrolled though seemingly endless chat logs with their inner circle, to create one of the most comprehensive portraits of the misogynistic internet star to date. “I don’t trust a word he says,” one source told Rolling Stone. “Now, he feels he has to say [these things] because there’s a huge army of little weirdos out there who want him to … [but] he’s just one of them guys. He’s a liar. He’s not trustworthy. It’s all a myth. It’s all a lie that he’s making himself believe.” 

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“I’m not an idiot,” Ed Sheeran told senior writer Brian Hiatt early on in their conversations for this April cover story. “When you say in your office, ‘I’m gonna go and interview Ed Sheeran,’ you must get sneers. I’ve always been that guy.” 

In this feature, Hiatt spent time with the star, his wife, and their two children in a luxury house in New Zealand during the Southern Hemisphere leg of his worldwide tour to discuss life, death, and fatherhood, and to see who, exactly, “that guy” is. What he found was a prolific songwriter, multi-platinum artist, and self-proclaimed nerd without a hint of imposter syndrome. Sheeran knows he’s a pop-music punchline, but, he told Hiatt, he has long since stopped caring. “I mean, mate, when I wrote ‘Perfect’ and ‘Thinking Out Loud,’ I remember being like, ‘Oh, these are a bit cheesy,’ ” he told Rolling Stone. “And they became the biggest ballads in the world that year. And you’re like, ‘Well, people must connect with cheese, then!’ ”

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Janelle Monáe has long been one of pop’s most enigmatic stars — but in this June cover story, staff writer Mankaprr Conteh shone light on her inner world. Traveling to Monáe’s Wondaland West compound in Los Angeles, Conteh sat in on game night, watched Monáe and her circle cut loose, and had illuminating conversations with the artist about everything from AI and futurism, to writing her new album, to what it’s like to express her queerness publicly, to her grand plans for the future. “I think being an artist gets lonely,” Monáe told Rolling Stone. “Most people don’t understand what’s going on in my brain. Community has been so helpful to me; it’s beautiful that I have a title called The Age of Pleasure because it actually re-centers me. It’s not about an album anymore. I’ve changed my whole fucking lifestyle.” 

Read the story here.

Nothing can be taken at face value in this wild deep-dive into Swagg Man, a French-Tunisian rapper with over 70 million streams who’s been accused of swindling huge numbers of people out of cash, using his baller internet persona to convince them to go into business deals — only to take the money and run. “Where exactly does Swagg Man, whose real name is Iteb Zaibet, get his money? That question has long dogged him,” Marc Wortman wrote in this feature, for which he talked with people who claim they were taken by Swagg, Swagg’s former music collaborators, and the rapper himself. “He stands accused of stealing or embezzling around $10 million over the past decade. He has allegedly scammed his own fans, his friends, and even a Swiss bank.” Though Swagg Man has denied all the allegations, earlier this year, he was convicted in a Tunisian court of defrauding 20 individuals. But he didn’t show up for trial — and he’s still living free.

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As the character Miranda Sings, YouTuber Colleen Ballinger gained millions of fans in the mid 2010s though posting comedic videos and building close relationships with her followers. But earlier this year, some of those from her inner circle began to speak out, saying they felt they had been taken advantage of when they were teenagers, and Ballinger was in her late twenties. According to this report from staff writer CT Jones, who spoke with four former followers, Ballinger would send sexually suggestive messages on group chats, push followers into providing free labor, and publicly mock them for laughs. (While Ballinger did not provide comment for the article, she later posted a video acknowledging the allegations, though she blamed them on a “toxic gossip train” and “mob mentality”.) “I found solace and safety in this online group of people,” one former follower told Rolling Stone. “And these grown-ass adults abused it.”

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Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — better known as Bad Bunny — wished for a quiet 2023. But as he detailed to senior music editor Julyssa Lopez in this July/August cover story, his year was anything but. From headlining Coachella to being the center of endless internet controversy, the Puerto Rican megastar has broken streaming records, elevated Latin music (both his own and those who came before him), and established himself as one of the most vibrant voices of our time. “He’s done all of this fearlessly and without compromise: He’s refused to make concessions to the Anglo market, challenged gender norms with his sense of style, and lifted up Puerto Rican and other Latino communities in the process,” Lopez writes. “His music is unabashedly political but also stylistically unpredictable, delivered in a one-of-a-kind baritone that’s made him the people’s icon.”

He brought this outspokenness to the cover shoot, too, sporting medallions that gave tribute to groundbreaking Puerto Ricans that came before him: Tego Calderón, Héctor El Father, Wisin Y Yandel, Arcángel, Don Omar, and Daddy Yankee. “When the opportunity to shoot with Rolling Stone came along, I was like, ‘Damn, that would be perfect,’” he said. “That’s my foundation. I’ve taken something from all these artists I’ve listened to and loved.”

Read the story here in English.

Read the story here in Spanish.

At the height of the pandemic, President Trump offered up more than $2 trillion for emergency loans — but where did that money go? In this feature, executive editor Sean Woods spoke with more than two dozen sources, from financial experts to law enforcement to victims of identity theft to those in on the grift, to find out what really happened, and how as much as $1 trillion went to fraudulent claims.

Part of the issue, Woods found, was by making the loans so easy to access, it opened up a world of fraud for bad actors. “When we think about criminal organizations, we often think of a tree or a pyramid, where somebody is up on top and moving down to different groups,” U.S. Attorney Ranee Katzenstein told Rolling Stone. “That’s not the model here. The model here is grass growing — because the crime is not complicated. You don’t need to be part of an organization. You can do it yourself from your mom’s basement.” 

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What happened to Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit? Fifty years ago, the two teenagers set out to hitch a ride to the “Summer Jam” at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway, excited to see the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band. They were never heard from again. 

In this feature, writer Eric J. Greenberg talked to experts, family, and friends of the couple, who are the oldest known missing-teen case in the country, to find out what went wrong with the investigation — and why their disappearance has never been solved. 

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The threat of artificial intelligence was one of the most talked-about topics of 2023 — from ChatGPT upending higher education to the imminent danger of deepfakes disrupting our elections. But in this feature, writer Lorena O’Neil spoke with a group of women who have been integral to the development of AI and have been trying to sound the alarm about its problems for years. To hear them tell it, some hypothetical, Skynet-type takeover isn’t the issue — the real issues are already here. “Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous,” O’Neil writes. “That they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities.” 

For the story, O’Neil spoke with Timnit Gebru, who co-led the Ethical AI group at Google; Rumman Chowdhury, former head of Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team; Safiya Noble, a professor at UCLA and the director of its Center on Race & Digital Justice; Seeta Peña Gangadharan, an associate professor at the London School of Economics whose work focuses on the intersection of marginalized communities and AI; and Joy Buolamwini, a former Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow who founded the Algorithmic Justice League. “I’ve been yelling about this for a long time,” Gebru told Rolling Stone. “This is a movement that’s been more than a decade in the making.”

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In 2003, Portland, Oregon power-pop act the Exploding Hearts had everything going for them — a hot record, a growing global fanbase, interest from labels, and a tight look and sound that they were sure would rocket them to fame. But late that July, it came to an end when three of the four members, all in their early twenties, were killed in a car crash while heading home from a gig in San Francisco. The band was effectively over, but in the two decades since, their legend and popularity only grew.

For this in-depth look 20 years after the tragedy, culture editor Elisabeth Garber-Paul spoke with more than a dozen people — including Terry Six, the sole surviving member, in his first detailed interview in decades, as well as family of the deceased musicians and friends of the band — for a portrait of a budding group who were ready to take the punk scene and the world by storm, only to have it all come to an end in the blink of an eye. Who were the real people — kids just getting a grip on adulthood — who made this enduring album? And what happens when you’re left as the guardian of an exuberant piece of art marked by intense tragedy? “To me, that record is a representation of that time in our lives, where we were young and stupid, and we didn’t care,” Six told Rolling Stone. “I always look [back] fondly — even the times when [singer] Adam [Cox] and I would come to blows. It’s still the best part of my life that I ever had.”

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Staff writer Kristie Lee Yandoli spoke with two current and 14 former staffers at The Tonight Show to uncover what it’s like to work under Jimmy Fallon — an experience they allege is toxic because of the host’s erratic behavior. (Fallon did not comment for the story, though he did apologize to staffers on an all-hands Zoom after publication.)

“It’s a bummer because it was my dream job,” one former employee told Rolling Stone. “Writing for late night is a lot of people’s dream jobs, and they’re coming into this and it becomes a nightmare very quickly. It’s sad that it’s like that, especially knowing that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

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“I felt like I couldn’t write a song without thinking about what other people were going to think of it,” pop star Olivia Rodrigo told Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio, describing what it was like to write Guts, the follow up to 2021’s immensely popular Sour. “There were definitely days where I found myself sitting at the piano, excited to write a song, and then cried.” In this October cover story — which was accompanied by a multi-media cover shoot from Taiwanese visual artist John Yuyi — the 20-year-old singer opened up to Martoccio about the pains of writing a successful follow up, her vast inspirations when it came to the album — from Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream to Rage Against the Machine — as well as her plans for the future. “I saw Stevie Nicks singing ‘Landslide’ to this huge stadium of people,” she said. “Not that ‘Drivers License’ is ‘Landslide,’ by any means. But I was like, ‘Damn.’ That heartbreak that you feel when you’re young, thinking about singing that song when I’m Stevie Nicks’ age … it’s really powerful.”

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CTE is a mysterious disease — though first identified in the late 1940s, it wasn’t until 2005, when Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster was diagnosed with it, that the degenerative brain disorder became a serious topic of discussion and study. For years, it was thought to occur after repeated concussions. But new research suggests that’s not the case: “This past June, the largest CTE study to date confirmed that the best predictor of future brain disease was not the number of diagnosed concussions a player had sustained but rather the cumulative force of all hits to the head throughout their career. In other words, a lot of little impacts could be as damaging as a smattering of major ones,” writes Alex Morris — meaning that the sport could be more dangerous than we thought, especially for kids.

For this feature, Morris spoke to the families of young people who had died after experiencing CTE, as well as to experts who detailed what the disease can do to kids who play collision sports — particularly those who play during the crucial brain-development stage between 10 and 12 — as well as what is being done to help prevent and treat the irreversible disease. “CTE hasn’t directly killed anybody in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, but we have a lot of people with CTE that have died at those ages,” one neurosurgeon told Rolling Stone. “Almost all of them have died by suicide.”

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Patricio Manuel recently won his third professional fight — but his future in the sport is up in the air. That’s because Manuel is a transgender man, and the rules surrounding who he is allowed to fight professionally are very much in flux. Last December, Mauricio Sulaimán, the president of the World Boxing Council, one of a handful of governing bodies in the sport, said they would be creating a “transgender division,” wherein fighters would only be allowed to take on opponents of the “same birth sex,” limiting the pool so much that it would effectively outlaw professional bouts. “For me, there is no other way to compete other than in the male division,” Manuel writer Ben Wyatt for this elucidative feature looking into the sport. “To have a leader of my sport saying that I don’t get to be a man, that I can’t compete even though I’ve been out here doing just that, you know, it really hurts.”

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Israel has long been home to a thriving electronic dance music scene, hosting everything from club nights to days-long festivals. On Oct. 7, one such event — the two-day Supernova festival in the Negev Desert, where more than a dozen DJs were set to perform — became the site of terror and tragedy when armed Hamas militants paraglided into the grounds, killing hundreds of attendees and kidnapping dozens more. It would launch the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, which Rolling Stone would continue to report from the ground, including in stories about the killing of a Palestinian doctor and the impossible choices for those forced to flee Gaza. But for this feature, writers David Browne, Nancy Dillon, and Kory Grow focused on what it was like for the members of the tight-knit EDM community who were at the scene of the initial attack. “We arrived at the party at three o’clock in the morning, all the friends met and celebrated life,” one attendee told Rolling Stone. “At 6 a.m., the hell started.”

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When Cash App executive Bob Lee was stabbed to death, many jumped to blame the alleged hellscape on San Francisco’s streets. But the real story was much different — days after his death, another Silicon Valley player, Nima Momeni, was arrested and charged with his murder. (He has pleaded not guilty, but faces life in prison if convicted.) For this feature, writer Albert Samaha traced the lives of Lee and Momeni, as well as the drug-soaked party scene that may have brought them together, for a glimpse into the lives of the elite tech class. “The weight of a city’s complicated and entrenched problems fell onto two men drawn to the same place from opposite corners of the world, driven by parallel hopes, colliding in a burst of unimaginable violence,” he writes. “But behind the efforts seeking to project deeper meaning behind the tragic killing lay the simple question at the center of the case: Why did Momeni kill Lee?”

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A self-described “reluctant crypto content creator,” Tiffany Fong spent more time with convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried than almost anyone else in the lead-up to his much publicized trial, relocating to San Francisco to be near him, sharing portions of the interviews with her legions of fans on X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. In this feature, though, writer Tracy Wang instead turned the attention on Fong, tracing her life from USC party girl to one of the critical voices covering Bankman-Fried and the FTX exchange at the heart of his criminal trial. “I respect her hustle,” a fellow crypto reporter told Rolling Stone. “She’s found a unique niche where she can share information that most traditional media outlets could not.”

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There is a time to respect the dead — but when the dead in question is widely credited with war crimes that killed millions of people, it’s time to call it as it is. “Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger,” wrote Spencer Ackerman in this scathing obituary of the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, who died in November at the age of 100. In it, Ackerman exhaustively details the life and crimes of Kissinger, from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to his role as an architect of despotic regimes in South America — and illustrates how his disastrous decisions and actions set up the world in which we continue to live today. “Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect,” Ackerman writes. “What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?”

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