Before the Velvet Underground, and before he became one of the most important songwriters of his generation, Lou Reed was a songwriter for hire at a company called Pickwick Records. He churned out songs deliberately intended to be top 40 hits and released under a variety of fake group names, the most successful of which was a song that they’d hoped would spawn a dance craze, “The Ostrich.

TIME November 7, 1988 12:00 AM EST Rock star Jon Bon Jovi grins impishly on the cover of the November Spin, but he was scarcely noticed when the music magazine came out last week. All the attention focused on a novel promotion — a free condom attached to an inside page. It was meant to encourage safe sex, Spin said, but some retailers flinched. Waldenbooks, Lucky supermarkets and Walgreen drugstores banned the issue.

March 27, 2012 4:00 AM EDT Photographers Alex Troesch and Aline Paley first saw the long, pointy Mexican boots on a video through Facebook. “It was so funny at first, seeing this group of people dancing in the boots to this crazy music,” Troesch says. “But then we realized how great it was to see another side of northern Mexico—people being silly and having fun. It’s usually portrayed as so rough, with a lot of violence.

For as long as Seemay Chou can remember, she has gone to bed at midnight and woken around 4:30 a.m. Chou long assumed that meant she was a bad sleeper. Not that she felt bad. In fact, sleeping just four hours a night left her feeling full of energy and with free time to get more done at her job leading a research lab that studies bacteria. “It feels really good for me to sleep four hours,” she says.

Silk Road is a black-market website on which buyers and sellers of illicit products, mostly drugs, could come together anonymously using software like Tor, which conceals web browsers’ identity. When the FBI announced this week that it had seized the site’s servers and arrested its alleged owner and operator, Ross William Ulbricht, the Internet almost immediately began speculating over the ramifications. One possible effect of the Silk Road’s demise would be a precipitous drop in the value of the virtual currency Bitcoin, which Silk Road’s users exchanged for illicit wares.