The Amazon Echo, an internet-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press In a move that promises to raise new questions about electronic privacy, detectives investigating a murder in Arkansas are seeking access to audio that may have been recorded on an Amazon…

T he eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death entered its newest phase one Monday in the summer of 2007, when employees of Google gathered to hear a talk by a writer and self-avowed geek named Merlin Mann. Their biggest professional problem was email, the digital…

According to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment, “Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world.” Photograph by Victor J. Blue for The New Yorker On the morning of August 7, 2014, a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out…

T he decision by U.K. voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that — for once — their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline. Media reaction to the Brexit vote falls into two general categories: (1)…

This is the first installment in our series examining the intersections of education and entertainment in 2016. Check back for more entries on late-night comedy, a play, animated movies , and television . The directors behind 2002’s critically acclaimed Lost in La Mancha are the unlikely providers…

A dilemma has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one? PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY CROSS / THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National…

I spent years working for Russian channels. What I saw would terrify the West. “There is no such thing as objective reporting,” the managing editor of RT, Alexey Nikolov, told me when I interviewed him in 2013. By then, I was based in London again, working in think tanks, and Nikolov met me in his…

A sign at Donald Trump’s victory party in midtown Manhattan, early Wednesday morning. Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty Images On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, a Manhattan real-estate developer who promoted his candidacy with the instrument of bigotry, was elected President of the United States. The…

ELKHART, Ind.—This city once had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Now, though, it’s booming. The once-shuttered factories of the recreational vehicle industry, which is concentrated here, are full of workers, their parking lots packed with employees stepping over snow banks to work long…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) A man writhes in his sickbed with a thick bandage obscuring his eyes, but of course we still recognize the face: It’s David Bowie. “Look up here,” he sings, “I’m in heaven,” the first words of a haunted, mournful song and video called “Lazarus,” also the name of an…

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Twitter post last week that the United States must “ greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability” provoked confusion and anxiety that intensified the next day when he added, in a television interview, “ Let it be an arms race . We will outmatch them at…

This is the second installment in our series examining the intersections of education and entertainment in 2016. Read a previous entry on a documentary , and check back for future pieces on a play , animated movies, and television . It’s no secret that politics has been especially central to…

Scott Olson/Getty Images [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or…

Glenn Greenwald, pictured in Rio de Janeiro on July 9, 2013. Sergio Moraes/Reuters The release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails last week was followed on Wednesday by Donald Trump’s invitation to Russia to find and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Trump has since claimed that…

Well before the White House or U.S. intelligence agencies publicly blamed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, two members of Congress did. Back in September, Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the…

Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism , entertainment , literature and the Clinton campaign…

(Ringer illustration) Steve Jobs saved Apple, but it was Tim Cook who made it the most valuable public company in the world. When Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 as senior vice president for worldwide operations, his job was to fix the company’s woefully inefficient supply chain. The new iMac, Apple’s…

Getty Images/Ringer Illustration Winner: Frank Ocean Micah Peters : After Channel Orange , expectations and demand for Frank Ocean were high. But he escaped the pop culture centrifuge and disappeared into the wilderness for four solid years to live out what was left of his 20s in peace: racing rally…

I wrote last year about the bizarre alternate reality game leading up to Frog Fractions 2 . In the ensuing year, leading up to the recent launch of Frog Fractions 2 , the ARG has only gotten more complex and esoteric. If you’ve got a head for this sort of thing, you can read the entire history of…

In a weak moment after a bad breakup, I downloaded Tinder. Soon, I was swiping daily through the never-ending human carousel in an attempt to get over my ex. I'm not exactly proud of it, but ¯\(ツ)/¯. Most of my experiences on the app have been pretty shallow, albeit sexual. It's par for the course…

The first time someone faded me, I did not take it well. I sent the male in question untold number of reproachful, schoolmarmish texts. I ranted to my friends until they couldn’t take it anymore. Later the same week, when the brother of a man I’d slept with months before invited me to a games night…

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world. Source Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad,…

‘Trump will also be in charge of a terrifying nuclear arsenal.’Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images I n a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The…

They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces. The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the towns are…

Chicago protesters demonstrate the wrong way to respond to the election! Photo by Whitney Dawn Carlson , from Twitter. “In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.” — Freeman Dyson I’ve struggled for the past couple of days trying to come to terms…

Vincent Peters You're sitting across from Miles Teller at the Luminary restaurant in Atlanta and trying to figure out if he's a dick. You've just told him, by way of making conversation, that according to legend the champagne coupe in your hand is shaped like Marie Antoinette's left breast, and he…

Donald J. Trump is president-elect of the United States. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Against all odds and against all forms of the establishment, he prevailed. He won, legitimately, including in many states that were thought to be safely blue. The pundits and the polls were…

"So, we're in hell," Marina Abramović begins, leaning across the table, "and the devil is sitting around, being bored." It's a pleasant October afternoon in New York, and the most well-known, controversial, and influential performance artist of our time is sharing her favorite joke, which, she tells…

“I’m a Southerner,” Jimmy Carter announced on one of his TV ads during his 1976 campaign for president, introducing himself to the nation. He was filmed walking through his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia. Today, the improbability of his election to the presidency has faded from public memory, but it…

Admit it, you enjoyed the American elections. And now, your life just feels so empty. What drama are you going to follow now? Reality TV is always the same, it’s depressing, really. You need something new. Something real. Don’t worry. The French presidential elections are coming up in May, and it’s…

Twitter briefly went wild on Nov. 21, with a story alleging that president-elect Donald Trump had pressured Argentinian president Mauricio Macri to push through a stalled project for a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires in a phone call a week earlier. The story— denied by Macri’s office —was poorly…

Illustration by Angelica Alzona. Earlier this year, I went to a dinner party at a friend’s house. The household and guests slowly assembled in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, moving a stack of plates from a shelf to a table, volunteering for a deli beer run, until finally a meal was…

(20th Century Fox/Ringer illustration) The Assassin’s Creed video game series, now spanning nine main titles, is, like the old adage about blind men attempting to describe an elephant, a strange, indecipherable beast. The overarching lore combines Dan Brown–style, levant-centric illuminati…

(Ringer illustration) The internet moves quickly. For most of us, the web’s ant-size attention span makes for a fever dream of headlines each year. And as dazed as we might be by the ravenous online news cycle, it’s nothing compared to whatever happens to the actual people, things, and institutions…

Ringer illustration Of the 44 startups that presented products at Y Combinator’s most recent Demo Day , a biannual event held by the Bay Area’s most prestigious startup incubator, the Flex Company was decidedly different. Alongside companies pitching encrypted enterprise cloud storage and…

Today, Facebook is starting to roll out an update to its platform, the first in many promised updates to stop the spread of fake news. It allows users to flag news for fact-checking, and marks questionable content shared on the service. But it stops short of explicitly labeling stories fake. CNN:…

George Michael … ‘His sexuality and his music cannot, and must not, be divorced.’Photograph: Imago/Barcroft Media M ore than 18 years ago, George Michael was famously outed for a “lewd act” in a Beverly Hills toilet – and promptly humiliated by institutionally homophobic newspapers. Some might have…

Before I had even watched Groundhog Day (1993), my childhood was fringed with the fantasy of alternate experiences of time due to a British children’s TV series called Bernard’s Watch (1995-2005). Bernard, the lucky bugger, had a stopwatch that could freeze time. Each episode he’d perform this…

It hurts to spend cash. Literally . And in a way, that’s a good thing. Because we’re living in a time where most people have less than $1,000 in their bank accounts, and almost $5,000 in credit card debt . Yet it’s unfair to simply blame the middle class’s financial woes on some lack of…

MIAMI BEACH — On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump wrote on Twitter that people who burn the flag should be punished with “perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” Two days later, I went to a little cafe here to meet with Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian punk band and activist art collective Pussy…