Kate Wagner is the founder and editor of McMansion Hell , a web site for people who love to hate the ugly houses that became ubiquitous before (and after) the bubble burst. Photo: Sam Horine If I had a dollar for every time I received a request to take on Donald Trump's interior design, I'd have…

The most interesting thing about Herzog and De Meuron’s newly opened concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, isn’t its wave-like facade, which rises above the city of Hamburg, Germany. It’s not the gently curved elevator at the base of the lobby that deposits you into the belly of the Swiss architects’…

I'm 18 days into my year-long shopping ban and so far, no slip ups. For fun, I have started keeping a list of all the things I even briefly think about buying, and sometimes I'll post the sillier ones to Facebook. On New Year's Day I hosted a dinner for friends, and a myriad of "when will I ever use…

Donald Trump is ready to take an ax to government spending. Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned. The changes they…

Starting a business is something we’ve done a few times at Virgin – hundreds of times actually, across more than 40 years. How do we manage to see these new businesses through from ideas to realities and into successes? Keep reading for my seven top tips. Image from Virgin.com Write a business plan…

The Type Snob And how to turn into one Can you name the typefaces drawn on this gif? The wannabe Back in 2014, I was a graphic designer who had just moved to San Francisco to become a UX designer. Before that, I had worked with different multinational conglomerates (well, more like dive bars,…

Uber and Seamless ads reveal how Silicon Valley is screwing us An essay by comedian/author Matt Ruby . Want more? Sign up here to get my newsletter . “These days, everyone needs a side hustle,” starts the Uber commercial recruiting new drivers. And it’s got bouncy music and the dude is hip and it…

LONDON — “Get on with it.” With those words late in a major speech on Tuesday, Prime Minister Theresa May charted Britain’s course toward a clean break with the European Union and expressed her fondest hope: that the time for “division and discord” is over. Her much-anticipated speech outlined what…

El-P and Killer Mike’s new album feels political, if only in its spirit of refusal. Illustration by Nick Little Run the Jewels is made up of El-P and Killer Mike, two forty-one-year-old rappers who, until a few years ago, were largely unaware of each other’s career. El-P was born and raised in a…

The Food Lab Unraveling the mysteries of home cooking through science. Profile Twitter Facebook Contact Printer-Friendly Version Serious Eats Watch More Videos [Photographs and video: J. Kenji López-Alt] This macaroni and cheese—this pot of creamy, gooey, cheesy, glorious macaroni and cheese—was…

Every four years, a group of U.S. intelligence analysts tries to predict the future. And this year, in a report released just weeks before Donald Trump assumes the presidency, those analysts forecast a massive shift in international affairs over the next five years or so: “For better and worse, the…

The room is packed, as recording studios tend to be at one in the morning. The weather in downtown Chicago is on brand: blistering cold. Inside are engineers and beat tweakers and Shake Shack runners and weed deliverers and weed rollers and childhood friends now playing the integral part of weed…

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump’s aides often cite his appearances at professional wrestling matches as an inspiration for his outsize political speaking style, and his buoyantly belligerent news conference in New York on Wednesday proved he has no plans to betray his brawler’s roots in…

How do you follow up a game like Frog Fractions (2012)? That’s the question its creator Jim Crawford had promised an answer to for two years. On December 27th, 2016, he delivered with the release of Frog Fractions 2 , which he had hidden away inside a fairy-themed city builder called Glittermitten…

Back in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the GOP’s presidential nominee, Republicans were very clear about what his victory would mean for the fate of the Affordable Care Act. That June, when the Supreme Court affirmed the law’s constitutionality, Romney’s eventual running mate Paul Ryan concluded , “We…

ROANOKE, Va. — On March 18, 1991, my life changed. I was an 18-year-old student at a community college in southwestern Virginia, working out at the gym, when I got a headache. A thunderous pain shot through my head and I thought, “I am going to die now.” One month later, I woke up. Two brain…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) Let me try to tell this first story as efficiently as I can so we can get to the basketball part of this article, because that’s what this is about, believe it or not. When I was teaching, there was a discipline policy where, if a student was written up for…

Santa Monica, Calif. — Donald Trump: freak or geek? Who better to answer that question than Judd Apatow, the executive producer of “Freaks and Geeks” and the comedian, producer, director and writer who has been in a spiral over the ascent of his fellow TV big shot and Twitter addict? “Geek,” he…

Medium made a big announcement yesterday. It was not a feature launch that is going to disrupt an entire industry — as you would expect from a tech company their size. It was the opposite. It was as un-announcement. An un-feature. And it was pretty bold. Photo: Matthias Ripp Today, Medium’s CEO Ev…

Like almost every other Kubrick work, it requires several viewings to even begin to unpack what is going on past the superficial plot points, which most of its detractors get hung up on. After Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Dr. Bill spend the first act flirting with hot models and Hungarian playboy…

The two official Twitter accounts of Denmark and Sweden shocked many followers when they engaged in a lively argument on social media about which country is really the best. Denmark.dk is managed by the Danish Foreign Ministry and Sweden.se by the Swedish Institute (or according to the latter's…

Places as far flung as China , North Korea , Iran , and the Moscow Ritz-Carlton have been vying to be President-elect Donald Trump’s first big foreign-policy crisis when he takes office. But Venezuela, grappling with political deadlock and economic cataclysm, is quickly elbowing its way to the top…

or: Why Your Friends Keep Spamming You to Sign Up for LinkedIn In December of 2013, I closed my LinkedIn account. As I retold in an emotional post Facebook post , I had discovered that I had been sending those annoying “Dan Schlosser has invited you to join LinkedIn” emails to my friends. Confused,…

YouTube. Twitter. Reddit. The Internet is one big gradient of rude behavior that starts with insensitivity and ends in outright harassment. Even in Daydream Labs , where Google is building the future of virtual reality applications and interface , the company noticed the propensity of its own…

The definition of a dark pattern is simple: “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.” As explained by the experience designer Harry Brignull, dark patterns are not bad design .…

Why do a phone? I asked Steve Jobs ten years ago today. On the stage at the Moscone West hall in San Francisco, Apple’s CEO had just unveiled what would become the most transformative product since the PC. Jobs clearly felt good about it. But the iPhone was such a drastic departure from anything…

Photo: Getty It’s been fun, but it’s about time for Republicans to admit that the great Donald Trump experiment isn’t going to work out—for them. One hypothetical version of President Trump—the ideal version, for Republicans, and one that many convinced themselves he would become, given practice and…

2016 raised the stakes, didn’t it? Just a year ago, it seemed like a big deal that iOS is always bugging us about our iCloud storage. Now, designers are asking themselves questions like, “wait, did my UI just give rise to a megalomaniac ?” [Photo: iDriss Fettoul via Unsplash ] We talked to designers…

Turkey has changed its law to offer citizenship to foreigners who buy property worth at least $1m in the country. The decree on the changes published in Turkey's Official Gazette on Thursday also grants citizenship to foreigners who make a fixed capital investment of at least $2m, keep at least $3m…

It’s finally over for American Apparel, the trendy turned-scandal plagued clothing brand whose first store opened in 1997. On Thursday, a bankruptcy court in Delaware approved an $88 million sale of the brand’s intellectual property and manufacturing equipment to Gildan, a Canadian apparel company…

In the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, explains the functions of the food replicator to a man from the twentieth century. Photograph Courtesy Paramount Pictures A spectre haunts Peter Thiel: the spectre of “Star Trek.” Earlier this week, in a…

The triumph of ‘My Way’ gave way to the death of Sid Vicious By Steve Jones My promotion into the junkie premier league came in the latter stages of filming The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle . If babysitting Sid through the recording of ‘My Way’ in Paris wasn’t going to put me off the dope, I guess…

Ben Pasternak Illustration by Tom Bachtell Ben Pasternak dropped out of high school in Sydney, Australia, last year and moved to New York, with the goal of making what he called “the No. 1 app in the world.” One recent afternoon, he woke up at one o’clock, in his twenty-seventh-floor,…

January 9, 2017, marks the iPhone’s tenth anniversary. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREAS RENTZ / GETTY As a young reporter writing about technology in the mid-nineteen-nineties, I got my hands on a Nokia phone. It was small, gray, and a bit heavy, with the usual twelve-button keypad that was part of every phone…

Well, gang, it's finally happened: We've made it past the point of no return. The notion of hardware being "smart" has, as tech-lovers love to say, officially jumped the shark. It's been headed that way for some time now, of course. But while we've been watching it wobble with random goofy gadgets…

Share Chaos has broken out in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once following a city government operation to remove manteros’ vending posts from the streets . Manteros are informal street vendors who get their name from the mats ( mantos ) they traditionally use to display their wares. This morning,…

The Emoluments Clause has never been tested in the courts, but most scholars seem to agree that if Trump doesn’t take the prophylactic approach to his conflicts, impeachment may be the only other remedy. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY MARY ALTAFFER / AP / REX / SHUTTERSTOCK In 1785, when Benjamin Franklin,…

The Norwegian radio host Geir Schau, right, and a well-known radio listener in the country, Berith Olderskog, left, joined to symbolically shut down the northern part of Norway’s FM radio network in favor of digital radio at a ceremony on Wednesday in Bodo. Jan Morten Bjornbakk/European Pressphoto…

With edgy marketing, an audacious founder and quality clothing sewn in Los Angeles, American Apparel was held up as a rare success story in U.S. manufacturing at a time when many in the garment industry were racing overseas. But after years of turmoil, American Apparel is selling its brand in a…

By Andy Trowers It was 2007 and a brand-new, casual world had dawned. The Nintendo Wii destroyed the hardcore competition in an orgy of motion controls and adverts with ‘normal people’. Casual gamers were in, core gamers were out. Sony offered the tech-heavy PS3 but it was expensive and didn’t…