Jackie Chan's father was a Nationalist spy. His mother was caught smuggling opium at a port checkpoint. The officer who caught her let her go -- and then married her. The real story is wilder than anything Jackie filmed.

Before stadium tours, before MTV, and long before digital sampling made it possible to fake a perfect drumbeat, one man played the real thing, thousands upon thousands of times. His name was Hal Blaine, and if you’ve listened to virtually any American pop song from the 1960s or early 1970s, chances are you’ve heard his work. Without ever becoming a household name, he laid down the foundation of pop and rock’s golden age. His career spanned more than 25 years, during which he

Imagine scrolling through a world without the internet, no Google search, no YouTube explainers, and certainly no AI assistants. In this...