An award-winning U.S. diplomat who was seen as a rising star at the State Department has issued a scathing resignation letter, accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Donald Trump administration of undercutting the State Department and damaging America’s influence in the world. Elizabeth…

Amanda Feilding used to take lysergic acid diethylamide every day to boost creativity and productivity at work before LSD, known as acid, was made illegal in 1968. During her downtime, Feilding, who now runs the Beckley Foundation for psychedelic research, would get together with her friends to play…

When I was very young, before I was on the internet — even before the internet was really a thing you could “go on” — I would dial into BBSs (bulletin board systems). BBSs were kind of like private , micro-internets that people set up in their houses. You had to use a dial-up modem to connect to…

I llegitimate and corrupt. Using the FBI as a political weapon and America’s secret police. “Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night, banging through your door.” This is special counsel Robert Mueller’s…

The New York Times chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, share their favorite pictures of the year. Manohla Dargis In March, the producer-director Brett Ratner said that the website Rotten Tomatoes “was the worst thing we have in today’s movie culture,” directly blaming it for “the…

Bobby Cannavale answered his own door. There was no assistant hovering. We had to be quiet, Mr. Cannavale said, because on the first floor of their new house, the first proper house in which he has lived, his fiancée, the actress Rose Byrne, was tending to their baby, Rafa, two weeks old. Softly up…

To call Bitcoin the biggest and most obvious bubble in modern history may be a disservice to its surreality. The price of bitcoin has doubled four times this year. In early January, one bitcoin was worth about $1,000. By May, it hit $2,000. In June, it breached $4,000. By Thanksgiving, it was…

I’ve been harping in this blog for awhile on the possibility of another American division, so I was interested to see a new novel tackle that subject. American War , by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-born journalist who moved to Canada and then to the United States, applies a powerful dose of global…

In 1997, I joined the production team of Charlie Rose’s popular interview show. I was the only black journalist on staff. At the time, there was little to no recognition of what it meant to be black and female in a workplace dominated by white men. Twenty years later, in this watershed moment of…

Greed has many costs. Siegfried Layda/Getty Images The price of a Bitcoin reached a record high of $16,601.77 Thursday morning before falling to $15,500, in what has been a weeklong tear in a price that was $10,000 a month ago and just $1,000 in January. As the value of the digital currency has…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration The conversation about Senator Al Franken has agonized Democratic voters and liberal columnists for three weeks. On Thursday, the Minnesota Democrat announced he would resign “in the coming weeks,” making him the second Democratic legislator to step down recently…

I like sex. And I like it in and of itself — an important distinction, I think, when so many of us use sex as just another avenue for self-loathing or self-esteem; showmanship or subjugation. I like my body, I like myself, and I care about my partners’ pleasure, all of which I think is like 99% of…

E ditor's Note: Woody Allen, who declined to comment prior to publication, has long denied the allegations described in this Op-Ed. Dylan Farrow's allegations against Allen were investigated by sex-abuse experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who found no evidence of abuse. Some questioned their…

Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-­possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that—in the most painful and personal ways—movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew. In 1997, just…

Slate executive editor Allison Benedikt recently wrote an essay about meeting her husband at work , when he was her boss and she was a 23-year-old entry-level fact-checker: “My boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk… My career, at the time, was in his…

President Donald Trump is said to have mostly given up athletics since he left college. (JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES) President Trump reportedly eschews exercise because he believes it drains the body’s “finite” energy resources, but experts say this argument is flawed because the human body…

To exploit the bug the attackers would need to know the email address associated with the Apple ID of the homeowner and knowledge of how the system worked.Photograph: Image Source/Getty Images/Image Source Apple has been forced to fix a security hole within its HomeKit smart home system that could…

Updated | Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate under fire for alleged sexual misconduct with teenage girls when he was in his 30s, apparently believes America was a better place at a time when slavery was still legal. At a campaign event earlier this year, an audience member asked Moore for his…

“Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm” David Silver , Thomas Hubert , Julian Schrittwieser , Ioannis Antonoglou , Matthew Lai , Arthur Guez , Marc Lanctot , Laurent Sifre , Dharshan Kumaran , Thore Graepel , Timothy Lillicrap , Karen Simonyan , Demis…

Chess changed forever today. And maybe the rest of the world did, too. A little more than a year after AlphaGo sensationally won against the top Go player, the artificial-intelligence program AlphaZero has obliterated the highest-rated chess engine . Stockfish , which for most top players is their…

Why it’s time to experiment with voice, and some technical tips on how to do it I’ve recently been working with friends at the Google Creative Lab on something I’ve been interested in awhile: how people and computers talk to each other. It’s a theme I’ve played with in previous projects I made, but…

Picasso with (left to right) Paloma, Maya, Claude and Paulo. Christmas at La Galloise, Vallauris 1953 Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in…

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them.…

The Knick ’s second season debuts October 16 on Cinemax. Photo: Mary Cybulski/Courtesy of Cinemax The Binge Director Steven Soderbergh can make a whole season of The Knick almost as fast as you can watch it. Steven Soderbergh is in motion. It’s a warm day in Greenpoint, and the 52-year-old director,…

Before Keurig, it was the pizza company Papa John’s that, by its own doing, managed an identity-politics double screwup. Photograph by Dixie D. Vereen / The Washington Post via Getty On Sunday afternoon, a Twitter user with the display name Snoop Baileyposted what would have once been considered an…

The good news: you only have to nail one of two things The short answer: it depends on who you ask, but there are two schools of thought… 1st school of thought: BE FUCKING AWARE. God, it’s truly amazing how many people are off in la-la land while love-making. It’s enough to make a partner want to…

Lingerie campaigns are pretty predictable. A beautiful girl poses in lingerie. Sometimes she’s in something that can only be described as a “ boudoir ” and other times she stands in front of a nondescript backdrop . For the lingerie brand Playful Promises , which has bras up to a G cup, that’s been…

Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list…

Director Denis Villeneuve Patrick James Miller/Redux When Arrival made the awards-season rounds last year, director Denis Villeneuve was already eyebrows-deep into making Blade Runner 2049, the Ryan Gosling -led sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult favorite, Blade Runner. “ Amy Adams, ” Villeneuve…

The first rule of interviewing David Fincher: Don’t talk about Fight Club . He directed that movie, along with Seven , Gone Girl , Zodiac , The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , and The Social Network . He’s also an executive producer of House of Cards . One of the most meticulous creators in film and…

As Twitter tries to figure out how to lock down the parts of its platform that enable harassment, as well as the spread of misleading information and illicit content, there have been a number of moments that highlight how the service, and its levers of control, are far from perfect. One such moment…

There was once a time where Björk thought she might not ever release a solo album. She said as much to SPIN Magazine in 1993, on the eve of the release of her first solo record, the aptly titled Debut . In the late 80s and early 90s, she stood most recognizably at the helm of a buzzy alt-rock…

As a kid, I detested it when my behavior was compared to what my peers were doing. It was arguably the most maddening part of my upbringing, which consisted of me bouncing off walls trying to avoid the worst of my parents’ ire. There was this feeling of betrayal that came every time I was compared…

Chloe Caldwell | Longreads | December 2017 | 26 minutes (6,433 words) The first outburst was about my landlady; the outbursts are always about a woman. My landlady had sent me a text message with a couple of aggressive exclamation points and capitalizations referring to a misunderstanding over a…

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with his Google Glass.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images I t seems like only a few years ago that we began making wry jokes about the doofus minority of people who walked down the street while texting or otherwise manipulating their phone, bumping into lamp-posts…

Can someone please tell people that use Mario, Zelda, or Uncharted as an example of "games not needing microtransactions" that the microtransactions in those games are called a "$400 console investment plus the margins on each game for the platform you buy for perpituity". — Rami Ismail (@tha_rami)…

Source: Andrew Baker/Ikon Images/Getty B itcoin is an illusion, a mass hallucination, so one hears. It’s just numbers in cyberspace, a mirage, insubstantial as a soap bubble. Bitcoin is not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who buy it and of the greater fools who buy it from these…