Gangsta rappers don't have to be thugs from the'hood before beginning their music careers.

Tupac Shakur was a well-adjusted New York City kid who acted in musicals, sang in the church choir and wrote sensitive poetry while attending Baltimore's High School for the Performing Arts.  

Ice Cube grew up middle-class.

But what are the limits of gangsta rap's ability to impart hard-edged street cred? Can anyone become a gangsta rapper?

These sound like questions for Hard Corey, my alter-ego.  (Read More...)

I spend way too much time on Facebook conversing with people I don’t know in real life. So I decided, why not try to change that?

Via a series of updates, I invited my Facebook friends to dinner—but only those I'd never met in person. This resulted in what had to have been the strangest party ever to descend upon the private events room of my local Mimi’s Café. (Read More...)

Social experiments are kind of my forte. I’ve done lots of questionable things for Men’s Health—like, for example, spending an entire day covered from head to toe in lube—all loosely in the name of journalism. 

So when my 5-year-old daughter recently started hanging out with the kids in our neighborhood, I decided to join her. But there was a catch: I wanted to be one of them. (Read More...)

My trembling right foot slips off the rung as I descend the ladder backward. The ground, where so many of my fondest memories have occurred, lies 921 feet straight down.

I don't want to say I'm afraid of heights, but I talk to God whenever the ski lift goes over those roller things. Yet here I am, hanging outside the observation tower at the Stratosphere, washing the windows. Yes, the ones at the tippy top.

And I've lost my footing. My ass is glass. (Read More...)

The comb I’m running through the hair of a 7-year-old boy has two sesame seeds on it. Both are dark brown and moving.

I have hated nit-picking before, but never like this.

“Comb at more of an angle,” I’m instructed by Bianca Ocon. “Front to back, then side to side.” (Read More...)

I’m standing in my underwear in the Las Vegas living room of fetish porn star Olivia Rose, dripping with shaving cream. Rose, a voluptuous 30-something redhead who stands five-foot-four but adds a foot in attitude, has pied me in the face eight times (actually, seven, because the last two pies were delivered concurrently). But I suppose it’s been for a good cause. Within two or three months, hundreds of guys with a specific sexual proclivity will have paid $8.99 to watch – and probably rewatch – a video of my humiliation.

The fetish, which is called WAM (wet and messy) or “sploshing,” involves the smearing of food or another liquid or sticky substance all over a person’s body. (Read More...)

I’m a straight man. I watch sports, surf Pornhub, and I’m married to a lovely woman who sometimes even agrees to have sex with me.

But recently, I agreed to the strangest intimate experience of my life: I was chosen to snuggle by a beefy dude who spotted my photo on a professional cuddling site.

Let me explain. I pitched this stunt to Maxim as an exploration of the weird world of professional cuddlers. Non-sexual cuddling was supposedly created in 2004 by two New York City relationship coaches as a way to reintroduce intimacy to young people living increasing percentages of their lives online. (Read More...)