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…

ON DECEMBER 31st the world’s oldest coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow, in Amsterdam, was forced to roll down its bright yellow shutters one last time. Over the past half-century, many a foreigner has smoked their first spliff at this cosy cafe, which sat perfectly on the route between two tourist…

(Ringer illustration) The CES booth for e-commerce giant Alibaba is shockingly small. The exhibition space for Victrola record players (yes, Victrolas are back) one booth over is nearly as big, and virtually everything in this vicinity of the Las Vegas Convention Center is being drowned out by a…

Hillary Clinton as New York City mayor? Imagine the fun: City building inspectors start to show up daily at Trump Tower, where they find a wobbly beam here, a missing smoke detector there, outdated wiring all over the place. City health inspectors fan out through Trump’s hotels, writing citations…

MIEKO TERADA moved to Tama in 1976, at about the same time as everyone else there. Back then, the fast-growing city in Tokyo’s suburban fringe was busy with young married couples and children. These days, however, the strip of shops where Ms Terada runs a café is deathly quiet, her clientele…

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid. A code associated with the Russian…

The New Year’s Eve shooting at a dance club in Istanbul, which killed thirty-nine people and injured dozens, was the latest in a series of violent attacks against the Turkish state. Photograph by REX via AP Following the New Year’s Eve attack in Istanbul, democracy in Turkey is likely to enter a…

WITHIN hours of the Brexit referendum last summer David Cameron had resigned, and within three weeks Theresa May had succeeded him as prime minister. The speed of her ascent to power, on July 13th 2016, without a general election or a full-blown Tory leadership contest, meant that Mayism was never…

Hip-hop producers have long had to conjure up a voice to build recognition: Dr. Dre and Kanye West learned to rap; Mike Will Made-It and Metro Boomin added sonic name tags to their beats. But in recent years amateurs have emerged at the fore via new channels. SoundCloud, the audio-hosting service,…

Box Brown In the world of professional wrestling, no single person is as influential — or as reclusive — as WWE chairman Vince McMahon. When he gives candid interviews, they’re mostly topical or overly invested in story lines, pushes, and backstage politics. But perhaps the most interesting things…

- Nov. 8th 2016 5:19 am ET @FredericLambert Hyperloop One, the main company developing the hyperloop system envisioned by Elon Musk, had two big announcements today. While they are still working on their full-scale prototype track in North Las Vegas , the company unveiled the concept for their…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) 2017 could very well be the year of the robot — not the T-1000 or even the real-life anthropomorphic monstrosities that garner viral headlines every few months, but rather stand-alone living-room devices imbued with AI smarts. Google Home and Amazon’s Echo are the…

“Jane Pauley! You’re all in leather,” said Samantha Bee, as Ms. Pauley walked into the private dining room at Asiate restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in New York. And she was: in a sleek, black leather suit. “My husband calls it my biker-chick outfit,” Ms. Pauley said, surveying a sleeve…

Jewel identity: Killer Mike and El-P.Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian “ Is there a tax write-off thing for cults or is that just religions?” asks Jaime Meline AKA El-P, as he sits in a practise room on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, where Run The Jewels are preparing for their forthcoming world…