Vijaya Lakshmi, a visitor from India who is not used to escalators, fell when the speed increased, and remained seated. Another rider helped her get up before reaching the top so her dress would not get caught in the steps. James Estrin/The New York Times The Metropolitan Transportation Authority ’s…

Crowded cities need certain unwritten rules to keep them functioning. You don't stop dead in the middle of a pavement without warning. You let people off of the train before you try to get on. One of the most important in London – one that all Londoners instinctively understand, and get visibly…

While Londoners may still be recovering from the trauma, many outside the capital probably completely missed Transport for London’s audacious and sacrilegious experiment at Holborn station . For three weeks, tube passengers stood on both sides of the escalators going up from the platforms to the…

Chatbots already have a little bit of a bad name. Early reviews for the ones on Facebook Messenger have been rough due to apparent malfunctions, and Microsoft's Tay has been an utter disaster, at least on a couple of occasions. But a startup called ReplyYes, which offers a text-to-buy system for…

A cycling company that was seeing a high number of its bikes getting damaged during deliveries has seemingly solved the problem by making a simple change: printing a flatscreen television screen on the boxes. By masking its bikes as TVs, VanMoof, a Dutch manufacturer that exports bikes to customers…

Home Portrait Assignments Shanghai Photographer Tokyo Photographer Beijing Photographer Korean Photographer Industrial &... Singapore Photo 2 Hong Kong Photographer Galleries Search About Contact Lightboxes SINOPIX PHOTO Farmers steal natural gas from the Sinopec Petrochemical oil field in Puyang,…

The ability to measure store visits from AdWords launched in December 2014 , and there are currently hundreds of advertisers that are taking advantage of it. It makes sense; users search for something and then end up buying it in a store, hotel, dealership or somewhere else instead of online. This…

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, center, speaking with President-elect Donald J. Trump from her office in Taipei on Friday. Reuters When President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke on the phone with Taiwan ’s president on Friday, he was wading into one of Asia’s longest-running and sensitive issues: the…

Carving swans from apples at a Blenheim Forge workshop in April. My first full year working at Fluxx on a series of fascinating projects and learning about... Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12…

A few weeks, I was trying to call to Cuba . I got an error message—which, okay, international telephone codes are long and my fingers are clumsy—but the phone oddly started dialing again before I could hang up. A voice answered. It had a British accent and it was reading: “...the moon was shining…

‘We ought to just get over it our own weird attachment to facts and words.’Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images T he late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say that everyone was entitled to their own opinion but not to their own set of facts. He obviously never imagined a world…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) “You gotta say something that matters, Che, like what’s going on, man … Don’t hold back.” This is what Michael Che says in the opening bit of his new Netflix special, Michael Che Matters, and he holds true to his word for the next hour. But anyone who knows Che…

Jon Stewart is a seasoned satirical news expert. Last night (Nov. 30) in New York City, the former Daily Show host took aim at the real media, commenting on its failures in the latest election cycle and its loss of trust among Americans. “What the media has become is an information-laundering…

The new album from A Tribe Called Quest, “We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service,” is about trying to be a better person: to engage with the world in deeper, more mindful, and more loving ways. Photograph by Chad Batka / The New York Times / Redux On a recent Friday evening, the hip-hop…

MANILA — On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for. In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte.…

When Julia Jones arrived at her office in Santa Monica at 8 a.m. — by Hollywood screenwriter standards, the crack of dawn — she found Stephen K. Bannon already at his desk, which was cluttered with takeout coffees. They were co-writers on a Ronald Reagan documentary, but Mr. Bannon had pretty much…

The similarities between Gamergate and the current so called ‘alt-right’ movement are huge, startling, and in no way a coincidence.Photograph: Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF I t’s understandable that the world didn’t much care about Gamergate. The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to…

The popularity of hacking fantasies today has more in common with a legend like Robin Hood than what might be immediately apparent. In both cases, one of society’s underdogs has found a way to cheat the systems upheld by authorities and turn them on their head—either through stealing money or…

None of this would've happened had Jennifer Thompson not gone thriftin'. This was in April 2013, and she was browsing clothes and $1 DVDs at the Steele Creek Goodwill in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, when she noticed it behind the glass counter. The video game title sparked a memory, a Yahoo…

Humans have been creating images of sex and genitalia for millions of years, but it is only in the past few centuries—since the 1600s, according to historians—that these representations started meeting academics’ preferred definition of pornography, which involves both the violation of taboos and…

For the past 11 years, an eternity in internet time, Reddit has touted itself—repeatedly, and loudly—as the place to have “authentic conversations” online. For a variety of reasons, that sentiment has always rang hollow. Now, Reddit, in its goal to be a laissez-faire haven of (relatively) free…

Game Info Platform Win Publisher Surprise Attack Games Developer Osmotic Studios Release Date Oct 27, 2016 It's timely that Orwell , a game about state surveillance from developer Osmotic Studios, is set in a fictional country (called The Nation) that's not unlike Britain, a country which once…

Photo: Getty Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, has an economic firestorm on his hands following his decision to ban the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes. In his monthly address on Sunday, Modi took his ambitions further with a call for a cashless society. According to a translation by Reuters , Modi…

I think there is something wrong with us. I think we have a problem with power, and with our fantasies about power. Just a few weeks ago, I would have said I was an evangelist, a person who believed in the power of technology and entertainment to teach us things, and to be good for us. Now it’s as…

Paul White. Photo by Owen Richards. If you’ve been following rap from 2011 to now, chances are very likely you’ve heard the work of Paul White . The London producer’s name has been attached to several critically acclaimed projects in 2016 alone. This year, he released a collaborative album with…

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 science…

Most people realize that fast food isn't the healthiest or best-tasting cuisine. It is, however, expected to be fast. Because, you know, that's what it's called. Many chains like McDonald's have struggled with slower food delivery in recent years, because there are more items on the menu (among…

Getty This weekend, San Francisco’s Municipal Railway was savaged by hackers demanding over $70,000 in bitcoins, leaving the metro system unable to collect fares. But the hack may be much more devastating for the transit agency, according to a list of servers allegedly compromised by the hackers and…

Sharon Jones sang and moved in a way that seemed so pure and instinctive it made every other performer in her orbit appear calculated and sluggish by comparison. Photograph by Tom Watkins / REX / Shutterstock In early 2014, I sat down for breakfast with the soul singer Sharon Jones. She was giving a…

(Ringer illustration) There’s a scene in the fourth season of Weeds where Mary-Louise Parker’s character Nancy gets stuck in abysmal border-crossing traffic on the way to Mexico. After sipping on her ever-present Starbucks Venti iced latte for hours, she breaks down, removes the top from the empty…

Karim Rashid is one of the most prolific designers of his generation, he has actually made an art of bringing new ideas and innovation to the widest-possible audience. Karim Rashid is the paramount design mind in popular culture today, something he understands as a universal global culture. Yet as a…

Looking back a couple of decades, it’s not that much of a shock that turntablism produced a masterpiece. It’s more of a shock that it produced only one masterpiece. DJing, of course, had been a vastly important part of hip-hop for decades before 1996, the year DJ Shadow released Endtroducing….. .…

Sun., May 15, 2016 Karim Rashid had a very Karim Rashid-specific problem. It was March, and the industrial designer, who doesn’t believe in checked baggage for most travel, arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan, with his carry-on packed precisely for the warm forecast, and his preferred colour scheme. Karim…

San Francisco Municipal Railway riders got an unexpected surprise this weekend after the system’s computer systems were apparently hacked. According to the San Francisco Examiner , the MUNI system had been attacked on Friday afternoon. MUNI riders were greeted with printed "Out of Service" and…