Five years ago, on April 30, 2013, Chance The Rapper released his sophomore mixtape, Acid Rap . It's the project that changed everything for then-20-year-old Chancelor Bennett: Before Chance was the first artist to be nominated for, and win, a Grammy for a streaming-only release—before he became the…

SEOUL, South Korea — Keeping diplomatic developments coming at a head-snapping pace, the South Korean government said on Sunday that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had told President Moon Jae-in that he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed to formally end the Korean War…

The world's magicians are at war with each other over the "Art of Misdirection" — an ultra-secret website dedicated to magical piracy. It has pitted professionals desperate to protect their secrets against thieving renegades, naming-and-shaming them and even reporting them to the FBI. The mysterious…

Comedy has no rules, per se. But in my 15 years of writing and performing, I’ve come up with a few guidelines that I find helpful: 1. Be funny. 2. Tell the truth. 3. Make people in power uncomfortable. By that math, in her performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday…

Charlie Chaplin on the set of "The Pilgrim," which was released in 1923 Associated First National Pictures / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis / Getty The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be…

Comedian Michelle Wolf following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 28, 2018 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images After her performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner caused a journalistic existential meltdown and tweet after tweet of liberal hand-wringing and…

Michelle Wolf headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images Comedian Michelle Wolf headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, shocking the crowd and spinning up indignation among Republicans and even some journalists for accusing press…

As tech giants and high-end audio firms like Amazon and Sonos introduce sophisticated AI-powered sound systems to the audio world, Ikea is going a decidedly more analog route. Its new, multicomponent audio system, called Frekvens, aims to turn homes into party central with a range of decidedly…

Michelle Wolf’s routine was only as obscene as the Presidency itself. Photograph by Cheriss May / NurPhoto via Getty On Saturday, the comedian Michelle Wolf, performing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered the most consequential monologue so far of the Donald Trump…

The members of this Scottish group are rappers, but just barely. They squirm around categorization so nimbly that pretty much any comparison—to Joy Division, Saul Williams, the Raincoats, the Ronettes—fits if you squint just so. It’s best to take them as they are: Graham (G) Hastings, Alloysious…

Photo Credit: Dan Farber Deliberate experimentation is more important than deliberate practice in a rapidly changing world. Most people think that Edison invented the first light bulb. They’re wrong. In fact, Edison was spectacularly late to the game. In 1878, when the 36-year-old inventor decided…

Applying Silicon Valley culture to carmaking didn't work Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2015. ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images Building cars at scale is one of the most complex and capital-intensive manufacturing tasks in the world. To cope with these challenges, carmakers tend to have a highly…

Kanye West has repeatedly said that if you’re a fan of Kanye West, then you’re a fan of yourself. You’re a champion in his eyes. Do it for the glory. “Go listen to all my music,” he once told Zane Lowe . “It’s the codes of self-esteem.” So what does it mean to be a fan of Kanye West now, as he…

WASHINGTON — The panna cotta had been served and the First Amendment duly celebrated by the time the comedian Michelle Wolf took the stage on Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. What followed was a roast that took unflinching aim at some of the notables in the room — and…

Enlarge / Is this essentially the same as a kid buying a box of car skins in Rocket League ? Getty Video game loot boxes Trade group prez: Loot box regulation “challenges our freedom to innovate” Despite backlash, loot boxes could be essential to gaming’s future Video game loot boxes are now…

After six months behind bars, Meek Mill was released on bail Tuesday evening. According to multiple reports , the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overruled a lower court in Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon. Their order overturns Judge Genece Brinkley's highly controversial decision to send the the…

Ronny Jackson, who withdrew, on Thursday morning, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. Photograph by Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via Getty Donald Trump’s failed nomination of the White House physician, Ronny Jackson , to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs might be the…

Tech CEOs are out for themselves, not the public good Silicon Valley has no shortage of big ideas for transportation. In their vision of the future, we’ll hail driverless pods to go short distances — we may even be whisked into a network of underground tunnels that will supposedly get us to our…

A demonstration in favor of more liberal abortion laws, in Dublin in March. Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters Ireland plans to hold a landmark referendum on abortion at the end of May . Voters will be asked to consider a repeal of Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, known as the Eighth Amendment, which…

Stars spun into existence in the deep womb of the sky and burned out again, and planets rose and set, and at the end of the last age of men the great wolf Fenris rose from the deep and swallowed the Earth — and Donald Trump was still on the phone with “Fox & Friends” after calling in with a lot of…

For his latest project, the soundtrack to the breakdancing video game Floor Kids , Montreal turntablist Kid Koala reached back into his earliest musical memories. “I started scratching when I was 12. My friends and I were so into the scene before some of us branched into graffiti and some into…

Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden) plays well with others on “Die Cut,” the DJ’s first album in 12 years. (Joseph Armario) The worlds of hip-hop, dance and funk have changed a lot since the last time Cut Chemist put out a full-length album. Back in 2006, as the DJ (real name: Lucas MacFadden) was…

In 2018 the personal has never been more political. As discussions of gender, race and identity have come to the forefront of society, what’s political and what’s personal is increasingly unclear. You can see it in the growing polarisation between the left and the right, feel it in the conspicuous…

When you treat people the way you’d like to be treated, cool things happen… Most of the so-called marketing “influencers” out there are celebrities. They’ve made it. They’re not in the trenches anymore. They forgot how to “do” marketing; their employees promote their new books for them, build their…

Play Video 13:04 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video ‘F ind Christopher Wylie.” That instruction – 13 months ago – came from the very first ex-Cambridge Analytica employee I met. He was unequivocal. Wylie would have answers to the two…

In 2008, web-comic artist Tim Buckley sat down to write a dramatic four-panel strip for his long-running comic "Ctrl+Alt+Del." What he ended up creating was loss.jpg, the web’s best-known and longest-running meme about a miscarriage. “ I’m not sure what I anticipated, to be honest. I knew it was…

Detail from the cover art for Comic Shop. Image: Swallow Press Comic book shops can be great or awful places, depending on where you go. But they remain a key part of how many people experience the characters and creativity that the comics medium has to offer. A recently released book gives a…

Small tweaks to incentivize engaging with a book’s content. I’ve been using Kindles on and off ever since they launched. Our relationship has been contentious but I’ve always been seduced or re-seduced by their potential. At their best, they are beautiful devices. At their worst, infuriating. They…

Sean Hannity appears at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February 2016.Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP When Sean Hannity was named in court this week as a client of Donald Trump’s embattled legal fixer Michael Cohen, the Fox News host insisted their discussions had been…

The Fortitude Coffee shop in Edinburgh.Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer G o to Shoreditch Grind, near a roundabout in the middle of London’s hipster district. It’s a coffee shop with rough-hewn wooden tables, plentiful sunlight from wide windows, and austere pendant lighting. Then head to…

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world I gor Schwarzmann is the German co-founder of Third Wave, a strategy consultancy based in Berlin that works with small-scale industrial manufacturers. The company’s clients range across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the…

Craft is a word that used to mean something. It meant an activity that involved a skill using your hands. But it has been co-opted by brands and strategists to sell us a story about authenticity, which has diluted its meaning. Now the authenticity bubble is about to burst. It is a bubble that…

It’s time to call misogynist extremism by its name. On Friday night, a young man went on a massacre in Santa Barbara that left six other people dead and seven injured. In the hours before the massacre, the suspect, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger , had uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Retribution”. In…

The BBC made its sprawling trove of sound effects available to the public late last week, and you ought to spend some time going through it. There are over 16,000 tracks included in the searchable archive—everything from immersive field recordings to stock studio audio. If you'd like to relax and…

If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I’ll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally. Update: since this post was published I’ve tested…

College-bound Hailee Sussman* is the model of good fortune: She's the beneficiary of five protective older brothers, a fashionable mom with a lenient lending policy, and her choice between a sleek apartment in the bustling northeast city where she lives and a rambling family home in the adjacent…

Pixel Dust Digital Frank Sinatra. Michael Jackson. Ray Charles. Malcolm X. Elon Musk. Truman Capote. Buzz Aldrin. Prince. Tupac. Even Leni Riefenstahl. Quincy Jones has run with them all. Chris Heath stays up late with the 84-year-old music legend who has a tale to go with every famous name. "I feel…