On November 9, 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published. The magazine was devoted to popular culture, with an emphasis of pop and rock music. In its early years, Rolling Stone walked a careful line, covering bands and topics of interest to the growing counterculture, but with less emphasis on the more radical political aspects of that culture.

It quickly became a badge of honor for a musical act to appear on the magazine's cover. In 1972, the band Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show sang about their desire to be on "The Cover of Rolling Stone." The song was a hit, and the band made the cover, with the caption "What's-Their-Names Make the Cover."  Rolling Stone cover photos often became iconic, and a collection of The Complete Covers from the magazine's first 30 years was published in 1998.

In the 1970s, Rolling Stone began to be noticed for its political reporting and commentary, particularly that of Hunter S. Thompson, whose creation of gonzo journalism – a style which makes no pretense to objectivity, and which is marked by large amounts of sarcasm and satire – was enormously influential among his colleagues and later generations of journalists. Thompson's best work for the magazine is collected in Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone. The most prominent of Rolling Stone's recent political writers, and something of a spiritual successor to Thompson in the passion and anger of his reporting, is Matt Taibbi; Insane Clown President (e-book, e-audio, print) collects his reporting on the 2016 presidential campaign.

Rolling Stone has long been a source of information for the music consumer, and has published a variety of books meant to serve as reference sources, such as the 2001 Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and the 2004 New Rolling Stone Album Guide. The magazine's occasional "greatest of all time" special issues, in which the editors rank the 100 greatest albums (or songwriters, or guitarists, and so on) generate great interest, as fans argue about who should have been ranked higher or lower, and who was unjustly left off the list.

Highlights from the first half-century are collected in 50 Years of Rolling Stone (e-book, print), and the magazine's founder, Jann Wenner, is the subject of Joe Hagan's biography Sticky Fingers (e-book, print). Current and recent issues of Rolling Stone are available as e-magazines at RB Digital.

Also This Week

• November 7, 1728: James Cook was born. Cook was a British explorer and cartographer. Between 1768 and 1779, Cook led three expeditions to the Pacific, where he was the first European to make contact with Hawaii and with the eastern coast of Australia. He provided Europe with its first accurate maps and navigational charts of large parts of the Pacific. Cook was killed during his third expedition, during a conflict with a Hawaiian chieftain. Martin Dugard tells the story of Cook's life and accomplishments in Farther Than Any Man (e-book, e-audio, print).
• November 8, 1884: Hermann Rorschach was born. The series of ten inkblots he developed, known as the Rorschach Test, is used by psychologists, who use a subject's description of these inkblots to examine their thinking and emotional functioning. The Rorschach Test is now less commonly used than it once was, with some psychologists questioning its validity and usefulness. The Inkblots (e-book, e-audio, print) is Damion Searls' biography of Rorschach.
• November 12, 1917: Jo Stafford was born. Stafford was one of the most versatile singers of the 1940s and 1950s, comfortable with ballads, country, jazz, and folk songs. Her most popular songs included "If," "Shrimp Boats," and "You Belong to Me." In the late 1950s, she began recording comedy albums with her husband and bandleader, Paul Weston, in which they took on the roles of incompetent piano-vocal team "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards." Stafford had mostly retired by the mid-1960s, but recorded occasional "Jonathan and Darlene" albums until 1982. A variety of Stafford's recordings, under her own name and in the persona of Darlene Edwards, are available for streaming.
• November 9 marks the beginning of the World Barista Championships, in Seoul, South Korea. More than sixty national champions will compete, challenged with making a dozen specific drinks to exacting standards in only fifteen minutes. The documentary Barista follows several baristas on their journey to the world championships; it's available for streaming.