A local official in Sweden has a novel proposal to improve work-life balance and lift the local birthrate: give municipal employees an hourlong paid break each week to go home and have sex. Sweden is already celebrated for its generous welfare state , including 480 days of paid parental leave ,…

It's a thought that's crossed my mind on several occasions. If Super Mario is an Italian plumber, then where in relation to the Mushroom Kingdom is Italy? If I took out a globe could you show me? Could you trace your finger between the two? From where this thumb-sized man battles dragons and ghosts…

Image by Jim Cooke Oh God, it’s Oscar time again. Just what I needed in the middle of the fucking apocalypse. Donald Trump is President. Russia has hacked all of our phones and is actively watching us masturbate. And every public school is going to teach your kids that gay people come from the…

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in the first feature directed by Jordan Peele. Illustration by Richie Pope The hero of “Get Out” is a young photographer named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya). He is charming, reflective, and a little on the quiet side. His girlfriend is Rose (Allison Williams), and they…

Donald Trump so permeates the collective consciousness of the country that it is hard to imagine now living in a world without him. But there is one place where the president seems to be relatively invisible—the U.S. stock market. The Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq have set record highs in the months after…

Advertising today mostly yells at target groups instead of inviting people to engagement and conversation (of course there are exceptions — we’re getting better). Brands and their agencies rarely show an understanding that people like it when you, as a brand, approach me with an understanding of me…

NEW YORK (AP) — Martin Scorsese's Manhattan office, in a midtown building a few blocks northwest of the cordoned-off Trump Tower, may be the most concentrated bastion of reverence for cinema on the face of the earth. There's a small screening room where Scorsese screens early cuts of his films and…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to say so. It empowers the Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the…

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McDonald’s is known for its Big Mac, Happy Meals, and creepy clown mascot, but not for trying to be innovative with technology. Yet, the fast food chain restaurant teamed up with aerospace and robotic engineering firms to reinvent the straw and make it easier to drink its Chocolate Shamrock shakes.…

Photo by fPat Murray Kid Koala—aka Eric San—is renowned for his woozy, oddball productions and raucous party sets (enhanced by the koala suit, bombastic beats and chicken samples). But what you might not know is that the Montreal-based musician successfully balances his extroverted side with quiet,…

When Pokémon Go was in its prime last year, many of the game’s more popular locations were parks. And some of those parks got trashed. Understandably, if also a little late (at least for Pokémon Go) , local governments are now taking steps to try and stop this happening again. In Milwaukee, AP…

Uber is what you get when you take Silicon Valley’s most toxic values, add billions of dollars in venture capital, and spice it with endless adoration from a fawning tech press. The resulting cocktail has turned as putrid as it’s been potent. And the inebriated corporate culture of Uber is acting as…

IDEAS Bret Stephens writes the foreign-affairs column of the Wall Street Journal, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Bret Stephens delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read the full text of his remarks below: I’m…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) “It’s my little nirvana,” says Josh Davis, better known as DJ Shadow, in a scene from the 2001 documentary Scratch . He’s in the basement of Records , the aptly named Sacramento store he made famous via the cover of his debut album, 1996’s Endtroducing … . It would…

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in…

This is how the muzzling starts: not with a boot on your neck, but with the fear of one that runs so deep that you muzzle yourself. Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a press-bullying president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy…

With President Trump in his fourth full week in office, the upheaval inside the administration that West Wing officials had optimistically dismissed as growing pains is now embedding itself as standard operating procedure. Trump — distracted by political brushfires, often of his own making — has…

WASHINGTON — President Trump, smarting from a series of crises, moved his surrogates aside on Thursday and assigned the rescue of his month-old presidency to the only spokesman he’s ever really trusted — himself. For days, a frustrated and simmering president fumed inside the West Wing residence…

Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, jokes with retired Gen. Michael Flynn as they speak at a rally on Oct. 18, 2016, in Grand Junction, Colo. Flynn resigned Monday as national security adviser. (George Frey/Getty Images) The timeline below has been updated with more details from White House…

It might seem strange, but UPS delivery vans don’t always take the shortest route between stops. The company gives each driver a specific route to follow and that includes a policy that drivers should never turn through oncoming traffic (that’s left in countries where they drive on the right and…

On a recent post I made about how President Trump marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of my readers asked a good, but hard, question: Why did this regime single out some particular groups (e.g., Muslims, Latinos, Black, and Trans people) as their main targets, and not others? The post which…

Why go now? Rotterdam has evolved from a down-at-heel port city into one of Europe’s most exciting urban getaways. The 2014 opening of the Markthal (1) ( markthalrotterdam.nl ) supplied the city with an iconic visitor attraction and a shot of self-confidence – the arched ceiling of this market hall…

Analyzing the news of the past 24 hours The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did. I’ll separate…

Donald Trump has called for changing laws that govern interrogation techniques to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” | AP APPLETON, Wis. — Donald Trump believes American troops are afraid to fight for fear of violating the Geneva Conventions, he said Wednesday. “The problem is we…

The St. Louis Cardinals will lose two draft picks and $2 million for hacking the Houston Astros’ database. Jeff Roberson/Associated Press The St. Louis Cardinals will have to turn over their top two draft picks and $2 million to the Houston Astros as punishment for hacking into the Astros ’ computer…

This is from Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History,” but I’m going to use the old translation back when it was called “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and mess with the line breaks a little. If you’ve read this a million times, forgive me; it’s always worth reading again. A Klee…

So I thought my column this week would be a fun one, focused on the what-the-f&#k article last week in the New Yorker about some deeply narcissistic tech titans — are there any other kind? — who are “prepping” for the apocalypse by hoarding gold, stashing weapons and even buying spreads in remote…

When I read about the incredibly active first week of the Trump administration, I struggle with two competing narratives about what’s really going on. The first story is simple: the administration is just doing what it said it would do, literally keeping its campaign promises. Lots of people won’t…

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images Donald Trump is just a puppet who doesn’t care about anything. If Donald Trump has shown anything during his first eleven days in office, it's that he's a coward with no ideas of his own, who is more than happy to be a puppet for the true president…

Professional poker player Jason Les plays against "Libratus," at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, on January 11, 2017. Andrew Rush/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP Another game just fell to the machines. Yesterday, after 20 days of play at a casino in Pittsburgh , an AI built by two Carnegie Mellon…

In a message to staff today, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way: The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all – and especially challenging for us in the news business. It’s not every day that…

Some fans of the Neo Geo, a vintage video-game console, are willing to spend huge sums indulging their nostalgia. Photograph by Frédéric Bisson / Flickr Seven years ago, Shawn McCleskey, a dealer of rare video games, trading cards, and vintage machine guns in Memphis, Tennessee, made one of the…

(Amazon/Getty Images/Ringer illustration) Amazon debuted 50 new Dash buttons on Wednesday. I do not recommend buying any of them, for one reason: Dash buttons are an absurd gimmick. If, up until now, you managed to remain unaware of what a Dash button is, first, congratulations. Second, to ruin…

On the great Song Exploder podcast, musicians spend a few minutes breaking down one of their tracks, telling the stories of all the tiny decisions that go into making a piece of music. Usually, the songs discussed are fairly recent, but on the newest episode, DJ Shadow gets into one of his classics.…

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely. But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago,…

Updated at 8:55 a.m. DULLES, Va.—An enormous cheer erupted from the circle of lawyers when one of them read out the news from his Twitter feed: The American Civil Liberties Union had been granted a stay by a federal judge in New York that would temporarily halt parts of President Donald Trump’s…

War with the US under Donald Trump is “not just a slogan” and becoming a “practical reality”, a senior Chinese military official has said. The remarks were published on the People’s Liberation Army website, apparently in response to the aggressive rhetoric towards China from America's new…

On January 27, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to make good on his promised Muslim Ban . One of the primary provisions of the order is a ban on visas to the US to nationals from seven countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, which are all Muslim-majority…