A few years ago, Emma Coats took to Twitter to share 22 rules she learned about storytelling during her time as a Pixar storyboard artist. The rules are “a mix of things learned from directors and coworkers at Pixar, listening to writers and directors talk about their craft, and via trial and error…

"White does not mean racist." Tomi Lahren’s face appears twice its normal size on a massive editing screen. On a dark Dallas soundstage, Lahren is recording one of her signature "Final Thoughts" monologues, the closing segment of her daily television show, Tomi . Her glossy lips twist into a…

(Comedy Central) Wednesday night’s sit-down between Daily Show host Trevor Noah and Facebook phenomenon Tomi Lahren was a 26-minute Venn diagram where the circles never touched. You couldn’t come up with a better visual metaphor for our two Americas if you read a thousand literary dispatches from a…

Last night, I swiped my iPhone awake during a commercial. I had no particular destination in mind; it was an absent-minded liminal shift between two of the many screens that constantly, quietly invite me to interact. Without being even cognizant of what I was doing, I tapped the beachy neon hue of…

Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it. Vincent Connare Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to…

Luis Abreu has an interesting breakdown of basement menus in his recent post: Why and How to avoid Hamburger Menus . It has some great points and is certainly worth a read, but it got me thinking about when to break the “rules” of UI design. During the course of my design critique of Glassboard for…

It’s human nature to hate things that remind us of how dumb we used to be; Like teenagers who can’t stand their baby pictures, we prefer to ignore the proof of our humble beginnings. The same goes for artifacts of computing history—for proof, just look at the rage directed at relics of those early…

The hamburger icon is a classic. Even if you don't know it by that name, its three black bars are as familiar as your mouse's cursor—a constant companion on your cyber journey since the day you got your first computer. But who designed this icon? The hamburger is one of those UI features that's so…

“Good design makes a product understandable” – Dieter Rams Good navigation should do at least three things well: (1) it should allow the user to navigate; (2) it should serve as wayfinding, letting the user know where they are; and (3) it should help the user understand what the product is capable…

We now have data that suggests Sidebar menus—sometimes called Hamburger Menus/Basements—might be causing more harm than good. Here’s some public data: Side drawer navigation could be costing you half your user engagement Mobile Menu AB Tested Hamburger vs Menu: The Final AB Test One thing to have in…

Three weeks ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art—known colloquially and now formally as “the Met”—unveiled a new logo and identity system designed by the international firm Wolff Olins . The response from critics was swift and fierce. Influential typographer Erik Spiekermann harped on the logo’s…

(Comedy Central) This was not a five-minute charisma re-up, carefully orchestrated down to the slow jam. This was not an absurdist tableau in which all parties were in on the joke. In fact, Trevor Noah’s Monday-night interview with President Obama didn’t fit with any of the pre-established templates…

Aid workers and activists inside embattled east Aleppo have pleaded for the international community to save them from what they say are arbitrary executions of non-combatants by Syrian government forces as the regime finally closes in on the rebel enclave. The White Helmets civil defence and rescue…

Children are reportedly trapped inside a building under attack in besieged Aleppo , the UN’s children agency has said, amid reports that forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad are carrying out extrajudicial killings in areas of the city recently reclaimed from the Syrian opposition.…

What was finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint. What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark…

Madonna -- a global icon who extended her record as the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time in 2016 -- was honored as Woman of the Year at Billboard's Women In Music 2016 event on Friday (Dec. 9). And during her acceptance speech, she was fully ferocious, funny and brutally honest --…

People judge an experience by the most intense point and the end point. The judgement is not made from the sum of the entire experience. This is called the peak-end rule . It is a psychological heuristic popularized by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. He described the concept in a 1993 paper…

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system , according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals…

I’ve always been a fan of Donald Trump. I met the man in 1990, when I was a New York City street vendor. Four or five days a week, I’d sell the “Incredible Wiggling Hand” on the sidewalk in front of Trump Tower. The toy squirmed around like Thing from the Addams Family. One afternoon, Trump was…

The right-wing publisher Breitbart started “a movement against Kellogg’s bigotry” after the cereal company pulled its ads. PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL ACKER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY When the Kellogg Company said last week that ads for its brands would no longer appear on Breitbart, the perpetually outraged…

Adam Falklind noticed something weird happening whenever he would go rock climbing with his spouse at the gym. His partner, Ylva, would get odd comments thrown her way. Even though she had been an avid rock climber for seven years, a lot of people at the gym would talk to her like a newbie. The…

Millions of people visiting mainstream websites over the past two months have been exposed to a novel form of malicious ads that embed attack code in individual pixels of the banners. Researchers from antivirus provider Eset said "Stegano," as they've dubbed the campaign, dates back to 2014.…

THE easiest way to squirrel electricity away in times of plenty, for use when it is scarce, is to pump water uphill with it. Such pumped storage is widely employed where local geography and hydrology permit, but it does need two basins, at different heights, to act as reservoirs, and a supply of…

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel . While being an indie designer remains a gamble, experts prove the right tools and mindset can make a difference. The car-soccer game Rocket League ’s beta version launched in April 2015 with low expectations. Rocket League was a seemingly…

Years of neglect are eroding gaming history. Cartridges rot in garages, companies hoard demos that they will never release, and obscure titles fade into the ether. Some games may even be lost forever. What is happening? The biggest threat to game preservation is the degradation of physical media.…

[BUY J-Zone and Pablo Martin are The Du-Rites via Official Store , Amazon or iTunes | STREAM Below Interview] On the surface, the funk duo comprised of Jay “J-Zone” Mumford and Pablo Martin seems as unlikely of a pairing as putting mofongo in your quinoa salad or mixing beef tripe into your Cream of…

Elena Scotti/FUSION A few years ago, the software start-up GitHub faced an uncomfortable truth: It could be a pretty unpleasant place. It was 2014 and the company was growing rapidly as a hub for programmers to collaborate on coding projects. But as its user base grew, so too did its problems. A…

SHOP MENU CLOSE 7 Missing Historical Treasures That May Never Be Seen Again The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park Health Space science AMAZING FACT GENERATOR MORE FACTS PLEASE! MORE FACTS! THE LATEST Live…

When she was a teenager on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s, Donna Alexander fantasized about setting up a space where stressed-out people could relieve their tension in a safe, nonviolent way — by smashing mannequins, televisions, furniture and other objects. She was confident in her…

In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just…

A new study shows how to turn ordinary brewers yeast into a biological factory for producing opiates . Some scientists want to use this technology to make better painkillers. But other researchers — and the FBI — warn that this could lead to people brewing heroin at home. Jenny Chang for BuzzFeed…

When he was helping to choose writers for the staff of Fox’s television revival of “The Exorcist,” executive producer Jeremy Slater kept encountering the same plot point over and over. “One of my hard-and-fast rules when reading spec scripts was, the second that there was a rape that was used for…

Despite his huge record collection, DJ Shadow has moved away from sampled sounds Wed, Nov 2, 2016, 00:00 DJ Shadow will open the Metropolis Festival at the RDS on November 3. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage It all started at a Tower of Power concert in 1972, when an embryonic Joshua Davis,…

A biohacker thought he could sell something cool without consequences. The FDA thought otherwise. Allyson Laquian / BuzzFeed News Josiah Zayner, CEO and founder of the Odin. “Don’t be too impressed,” said Josiah Zayner as he cracked open the fridge. On the top shelf, next to Silk soy milk cartons,…

I have been alive for a long time. I remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when I was a 10th-grader, and then watching with my family through the grim following days as newscasters said that something had changed forever. The next dozen years were nearly nonstop trauma for the country. More…

Getty Images The state of the Jill Stein-backed attempt to recount the votes in the presidential election in Michigian can be summed up with this quote from Detroit elections director Daniel Baxter in The Detroit News : "It's not good." How not good is it? Well, federal and state courts have both…

A lesser-known artist you love makes a new recording — say, the hip-hop group Clipping or the Chicago punk band Mace or the electronic composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith . You feel you have to graft it onto your life. How does that go for you these days? Does streaming from Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal…