At 12:01 a.m. one summer night in 1981, a rocket ship took off on television. A voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll!” and five fresh faces—Alan Hunter, Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Martha Quinn, and J.J. Jackson—were introduced to America. The video for the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” began to play, and a brand new 24/7 cable entertainment channel called MTV was born.

Those five faces guided America through the rock and roll of the ’80s, when Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, Twisted Sister, Kajagoogoo, and everything in between ruled the airwaves. The video jockeys, as they were called, became celebrities on par with the rock stars they interviewed—and occasionally dated or partied with. Mark says he found out years later that they were cast as types: “J.J. was the benign black guy, Nina was the video vamp, Alan was the jock, and Martha was the girl next door that every executive wanted to fuck.”

My first time wasn’t as titillating as you might expect from a porn star. It was a boring cliché, in fact, and yet I wouldn’t trade the experience for a different one. I was at a drive-in movie with my high-school sweetheart. We did what every parent fears their kids will do at the drive-in: what started as a make-out session turned into something much more explicit. I initiated it; I’d always wanted to know what sex felt like, what it was really. I read a lot about sex, saw glimpses of it in movies, and was more or less culturally inundated with it. I was inquisitive and knew I had the ideal partner to explore new territory with. I wasn’t promiscuous, despite my later career choice. I was a perfectly average teen.

Watching our movies might lead a person to believe that adult-film stars were born with innate sexual abilities. Turns out, we aren’t that much different from everyone else when it comes to our first encounters. We start slowly, shyly, and awkwardly just like most teenagers discovering the birds and the bees. And while I think there’s a common belief that adult stars start having sex at particularly young ages, you’d be surprised to learn how many fall into that thoroughly average age category—and that some are late bloomers. I asked a few famous adult-film performers to recall their first times. Here’s what they told me.

The Audience with Dame Helen Mirren playing the Queen is the best show in London right now—but she upstaged herself on Saturday night when she stormed out of the theatre to tell a troupe of drummers noisily playing in the street outside to 'shut the f*** up".

In full costume.

“You scare me; I think you might need help,” said Norman Bates to his mother, Norma, on a recent episode of A&E’s shrewdly insinuating Bates Motel.

Given that we know Norman is eventually going to start dressing up like said mother and commence to knifin’ folks once he goes Psycho, this bit of Norman insight into the Norma psyche is both significant and indicative of what could have, should have, gone wrong with a TV quasi-prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller. Bates Motel, as co-created by producers including Lost man Carlton Cuse, did a fine job of casting Freddie Highmore as its adolescent Tony Perkins—he’s got Perkins’ wide-eyed, gulping demeanor down (very) cold—but the character of Norma had to be built from the ground up as the element that grounds the series.

Growing up in the late ’90s and early ’00s, you swore allegiances. You were staunchly Team Backstreet Boys or Team ’N Sync. But if you preferred your frosted-tipped group of matching-outfitted crooners to harmonize on love songs instead of dance in unison, you were part of a third just-as-passionate faction: Team 98 Degrees.

The adult-contemporary-flavored option of the turn-of-millennium boy-band craze, 98 Degrees broke out in 1997 with the swoonworthy ballad “Invisible Man,” sung by four swoonworthy young gentlemen: brothers Nick and Drew Lachey, Jeff Timmons, and Justin Jeffre. A bit older than the Timberlakes and Carters, 98 Degrees carved its niche as the mature boy band, going on to sell 10 million records and score eight top-40 singles, including “I Do (Cherish You),” “The Hardest Thing,” and “Thank God I Found You” with Mariah Carey.

“I met Lindsay Lohan for the first time on the day of this interview, in a borrowed luxury townhouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York,” writes Piers Morgan. “She was wearing bright striped pyjamas, smoking a cigarette and talking very fast.” Thus begins a 90-minute interview between Morgan, host of CNN’s Piers Morgan Live, and the troubled actress. The sit-down was conducted about a month ago and published in The Mail on Sunday.

The discussion between Lohan and Morgan touched on a variety of topics, including her drug history—cocaine, ecstasy, etc.; her relationship with Samantha Ronson; whether her parents are culpable; why she needs therapy; and more. Here are the most eye-opening revelations.

EVERY TWO dozen years or so, an adaptation of The Great Gatsby appears on the silver screen: in 1926, 1949, 1974, and now. If this fourth effort, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is to serve a purpose at all, it would be to send us back to the brooding grandeur of the original text, containing “a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins had described it.

But the book that rolled out under the night in roaring 1925 was not the original. The Great Gatsby actually began with a manuscript that Fitzgerald had submitted a year earlier with the title “Trimalchio,” after the parvenu who threw wild orgies in Petronius’s Roman novel Satyricon. As it turns out, the cleft between this first draft and the finished one is what separates the great Gatsby from the vague Gatsby, since even Fitzgerald once called his man of mystery “blurred and patchy.” Crucially, in “Trimalchio,” nothing is known of Gatsby’s past until he gushes about it after Myrtle’s death, already late in the novel. So Fitzgerald got to work. He carved up Gatsby’s overdue confession, cast it throughout the book, and reported to Perkins that he had at last brought Gatsby to life.

EVEN IF you haven’t made it to Broadway lately, you’ll likely recognize the names of this year’s Tony nominees for best musical: Bring It On, A Christmas Story, Kinky Boots, and Matilda. For the first time, each of the nominees is based on a movie or a text with an already famous film adaptation.

Regurgitating blockbuster material has become standard for Broadway—and it seems to pay off. In 2010, for instance, all the nominees for best musical were of the “jukebox” variety—squeezing one artist or era’s hits into a plot. Textbook example: the ABBA hit parade Mamma Mia! The last truly original—not book-, not movie-, not pop-song-inspired—musical to win was In the Heights in 2008. It saw moderate success and closed after almost three years. By contrast, The Lion King opened in 1997 and continues to gross over $1.7 million per week on average.

In this week’s top music video picks, we take a journey through a surprisingly joyful Gilligan’s Island shipwreck, a futuristic society, and a very bad day. From hip-hop to electronic and indie rock, and featuring artists like The D.O.T. and Sub Focus, see which music videos are becoming viral.

Empire of the Sun: “Alive”