Every major smartphone works the same way. You’ll find apps, web browsers, clean typography, and similar, intuitive iconography across them all. Eventually, you’ll land at a social app like Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, or Snapchat–and you’ll land there again and again, dozens of more times a day.…

China has announced that the largest floating photovoltaic (PV) facility on earth has finally been completed and connected to the local power grid. Long reviled for its carbon emission record, this is the Chinese government’s latest achievement in its ongoing effort to lead the world in renewable…

Wearable computing will fundamentally change the user experience. Future wearable apps will become more anticipatory and less user initiated. Rather than requiring input from users, these wearable apps will be aware of situations and states, presenting contextually useful and timely piece of…

(Giant Sparrow) Few stories set a scene as efficiently as What Remains of Edith Finch , the second game built by Giant Sparrow and the company’s creative director, Ian Dallas. In the seconds before we learn whose head we’re inhabiting, we size up our surroundings. There’s the white wake of a ferry,…

Brad Pitt is making matcha green tea on a cool morning in his old Craftsman in the Hollywood Hills, where he's lived since 1994. There have been other properties in other places—including a château in France and homes in New Orleans and New York City—but this has always been his kids' “childhood…

Dallas through the Looking Glass: Post-Truth and Kennedy Assassination Moviesby Chris Evangelista Here’s an alarming statistic: a recent CBS News poll revealed 74% of Republican voters believe the conspiracy theory that the offices of Donald Trump were wiretapped during the 2016 presidential…

Machine learning is going to radically change product design. But what is the future of machine learning? Is it the singularity, flying cars, voiceless commands, or an Alexa that can actually understand you? Before we can even get to that part–the grand futurism part–I want to offer a provocation:…

Snet cables intermingle with phone and electrical lines Photos by Brian Crecente/Polygon, collage by Emily Haasch The last rule of the Street Network is that you don't talk about the Street Network. But that wasn't always the case. For several years the clandestine Havana network of illegal Wi-Fi…

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are…

A man holds copies of the Captain America comic book at a store in New York March 7, 2007. Shannon Stapleton / Reuters Marvel Comics has been having a rough time lately. Readers and critics met last year’s Civil War 2— a blockbuster crossover event (and a spiritual tie-in to the year’s big Marvel…

Outside of recreational use, magic mushrooms have been shown in clinical trials to treat severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.Photograph: Farmer Images/Getty Images/Moment Open Mushrooms are the safest of all the drugs people take recreationally, according to this year’s…

These babes (including Sylvester Stallone’s mom) ruled the ring Members of the GLOW Girls pose in the ring on May 4, 1988. Jacqueline Stallone (second from right) manages the all-female wrestling team. (Laura Luongo/Liaison) R emember wrestling? No, not the 15,000-year-old, naked dude, Olympic games…

You’ve been seeing each other for a while, and it’s going great! You’ve hooked up several times a week for several months; you like him and he likes you back. But you might be starting to wonder: Are you just friends, or are you in a relationship? Here’s how to know if you guys are a “thing,” or…

Though it was, for a time, one of the only sex options for single people, the one-night stand has become increasingly less appealing. To start, one-off hook-ups are less sexually satisfying; chances are, a stranger can't anticipate the ear thing you like or be as committed to your orgasm as an…

Katherine Waterston is a bright spot in Ridley Scott’s latest entry in the Alien franchise, the misguided and unintentionally comic “Alien: Covenant.” PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK ROGERS / TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX / EVERETT In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial adventure “ Alien:…

One of the greatest political mysteries of our time is why President Trump has clung — and continues to cling — so steadfastly to the perfidious Michael Flynn. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, is at the nexus of Trump’s problems. There was Flynn’s lobbying on behalf of Turkey…

I t took me 18 months to write The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck . Over that time period, I wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 words for the book (about 600 pages). Most of that came in the final three months. In fact, I can confidently say I got far more done in the final three months…

Before anything else is said, please take a moment to consider the track "Turn On The Lights" by Future. Prior to cruising down the blurred but often brilliant motorway of lean on Xanax on molly on Percocet on weed, Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn released a consummate song – nay, floodlit hymn – about how…

Since 2007, Statik Selektah -- born Patrick Baril -- has been a staple in the production world. The Boston native's affinity for hip-hop and everything boom-bap has allowed him to connect with some of rap's biggest names. With an unblemished resume that includes Eminem, Nas, Action Bronson and Joey…

WASHINGTON — President Trump has never shown any reluctance to sacrifice a surrogate to serve a short-term political need, so he apparently did not think twice this week about exposing a series of staff members to ridicule as he repeatedly shifted his explanation for firing James B. Comey , the…

I heard about Roger Moore’s death during a walk in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning, when a young father looked up from his phone and said, “The worst James Bond ever just died.” He wasn’t talking to me, but rather to the toddler in the stroller in front of him, who seemed indifferent to the news. Kids…

Screenshot: Chevrolet TV Spot, "More Awards" The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders to shed some light on how the pop culture sausage gets made. If you’ve spent any amount of time lately tethered to a live terrestrial TV—watching the NBA playoffs, catching up on your TGIT shows, whatever—you’ve…

World Economic Forum’s skills list is way out of date Dion Hinchcliffe tweeted out a graphic (not exactly the one below, but essentially the same) listing skills for 2020 in contrast to 2015 offered up by the World Economic Forum. He got me to thinking. I think the World Economic Forum (WEF) — or…

Filmmaker Stephen Steelman on how creating in VR is a wide open playground, especially when you still need to find your audience one viewer at a time. When filmmaker Stephen Steelman transitioned from acting to behind the camera several years ago, he found his first footing with music videos and…

In the past, departing Saturday Night Live cast members have gotten whole sketches devoted to sending them off. Kristen Wiig was serenaded with song and dance from Mick Jagger and the rest of the crew; Bill Hader’s Stefon finally married Seth Meyers ; Will Ferrell got a series of testimonials . On…

South Korea’s military said it fired warning shots Tuesday at an “unidentified object” that flew across the demilitarized zone separating it from North Korea, marking the latest provocation from the North in recent weeks. As South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports , an object was detected at 4 p.m.…

On the surface, this is the story of how Asana went from a logo with three circles to a logo… with three circles. But like most things that seem simple at first blush, there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye. Our evolved logo — a symbol of collaboration and shared energy — is the…

DAMASCUS, Syria — On my last night in Damascus, some younger members of the Information Ministry-sponsored delegation in which I was taking part decided to have a drink. It was late April, and the bars and restaurants were doing good business in the cool and breezy evenings. An inebriated Russian…

Facing accusations of unsustainability, almond-milk lovers have recently been defensive, while the cow-milk people might have felt momentarily smug. Illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo At the end of my street, there is a Little Free Library. The contents are always telling: the neighbors’…

Javier Zarracina Impeachment of an American president is a weighty measure that’s only been used a handful of times in our history. And on two of those occasions, the judgment of history has come down against the impeachers. Andrew Johnson was an awful president, but the move by Radical Republicans…

Image via Getty In a break from recent tradition , the Democrats are planning to widely expand the number of districts they plan to contest in the 2018 midterm elections. But, in a sign that not every tried-and-true Democratic instinct is being thrown out, they’re planning on dumpster diving for…

Owing and driving a car in cities is nothing less than a daunting task. Following traffic laws, watching out for pedestrians and other vehicles, paying hefty road taxes, being stuck in traffic jams for hours on, and other similar problems are not only taking a toll on our health but our overall…

ILLUSTRATION BY LEA HEINRICH Dear Airbnb Renters, Thanks for choosing to stay at my place this weekend! I hope you have a lovely time here. Below are some guidelines for your visit—if you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask! Please make yourselves at home and have sex. Just to be clear: I…

Modern Romance. By Aziz Ansari with Eric Klinenberg. Allen Lane; 288 pages; $28.95 and £16. THERE is nothing quite like falling in love. The palms sweat, the heart races. It is a kind of madness that can be measured neurologically. Those early kisses flood the brain’s neural synapses with dopamine,…

On content discovery widgets, you can find offerings you won’t get on established celebrity gossip sites: blatant lies. I was on my phone, reading an article from a respectable news outlet, when I came across an ad tempting me toward a seedier corner of the web. It featured a photograph of an…

On March 25, 1997, The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous album, Life After Death , dropped. In one of the eeriest examples of art imitating life (or is it the other way around?), the album’s title, artwork, and much of its track list dealt with foreshadowing mortality. On the LP cover, Biggie posed with…

There is one picture from Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East that has come to stand in for the entire thing. It is a photo of Trump, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi holding a creepy glowing orb in a darkened room in Saudi Arabia. oh you know, a bunch…

If you took a math class at some point in the US, there is likely a bulky $100 calculator gathering dust somewhere in your closet. That would be the Texas Instruments 84—or the TI 84-Plus, or the TI-89, or any of the other even more expensive variants—a shoe-sized graphing calculator released in…

At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist. But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that…