SAN FRANCISCO — Ultimate Fighting Championship seemed for years to be a curio, a niche sport for those interested in seeing combatants pummel one another in an octagonal cage. But U.F.C. has become a global sports empire — and now commands an eye-popping price tag. The league, which promotes mixed…

I was seventeen and sticky. It was the summer of 1989, and I was off to college in a few months. The Massachusetts town where I grew up was decidedly blue collar, filled with teachers and nurses and the occasional sales manager. My friends and I fell asleep to the sound of our parents arguing about…

The ambush that left five police officers dead at a protest in Dallas on Thursday has altered the contours of the presidential campaign, with Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump canceling political events on Friday and striking different tones about the killings. Mr. Trump called the episode “an…

Updated July 10, 2016: Chief Brown’s interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/07/10/chief-david-brown-interview-part-1.cnn http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/07/10/chief-david-brown-interview-part-2.cnn Updated July 9, 2016: When all attempts to negotiate with the suspect,…

Say goodbye to wacky wigs for husband and wife KGB agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) on “ The Americans .” It’s a sure sign that the Cold War spy series is winding down for Seasons 5 and 6. But it also means focusing more attention on the survival of their marriage and…

Image via Shutterstock This week has been a catastrophe for Blackness. Two men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile , were killed by police officers within 24 hours of each other. Neither had committed a crime that was punishable by death nor did they put any officers lives at risk. It’s…

If you were inclined to pare down the reality TV show Survivor (2000-present) to three key terms, they would likely be “tribal council,” “immunity,” and “alliances.” The first two are part of the core Survivor game template. Every three days, there will be a challenge—early on between two tribes and…

Getty Images Early Friday morning, a police standoff with a suspect in the killing of five police officers in Dallas came to an abrupt end on Friday morning in an unusual way. "Negotiations broke down. We had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect," Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a…

Once, black home buyers were thought to threaten the character of a neighborhood. Now gentrifiers are seen as the menace. Illustration by Javier Jaén; Reference: Robert Carter / Getty At the Golden Globe Awards, in January, Ennio Morricone won Best Original Score for his contribution to “The Hateful…

BAGHDAD — Militants fired mortars on a Shiite shrine north of Baghdad late on Thursday, and in the confusion that followed, three suicide bombers in military uniforms infiltrated the compound and blew themselves up, the Iraqi authorities said. At least 36 people were killed and more than 40 were…

On Oct. 13, 1996, 35-year-old Sharon Lopatka from rural Hampstead, Maryland, rode a train south with death on her mind. She told her husband that she was on her way to visit friends in Georgia, then drove her blue Honda Civic 45 minutes down to Baltimore’s Penn Station, where she boarded the morning…

Remember when we asked Signor Benedick the Moor a load of questions from interviews with other people? Well it was such a lovely time that we decided to do it again, this time with rapper, producer, poet, screenwriter, activist, dance battle champion and "real motherfucking well-rounded MC" B. Dolan…

D ecember 1985: it’s an icy Toronto night, and 16-year-old Samantha Bee is on a mission to not fail out of 10th grade. It’s going to take some doing. Up until this point — and thanks to a “kind of criminal boyfriend,” who enjoys both car theft and tempting Bee to cut class so that they can lie…

Fieri embodies a kind of American buffoonery that has always been easy to mock. And yet, I keep watching. Illustration by Oliver Munday For the week of July 4th, we asked writers to describe a person, object, or experience that they think captures a distinctly American spirit. At some point I…

Donald Trump will make America an offer it can't refuse again. Photo: Marc Piscotty/2016 Getty Images Before his message was overshadowed by a scandal about his use of a white-supremacist image — a mistake that could happen to any candidate, really, so long as that candidate had inspired a massive…

OVER the past several years, we have borne witness to grainy videos of what “protect and serve” looks like for black lives — Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Kajieme Powell, to name a few. I don’t think any of us could have imagined how tiny cameras would allow us to see, time and again,…

IN HER NEW BOOK Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel traces the beginnings of American dating to the turn of the 20th century, when a new class of young, single women entered the workforce. These women were the servants, factory workers, and saleswomen in the United States’s…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

Update, December 1, 2016: Linton's fiancé, Steven Mnuchin, is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Treasury secretary . (You can't make this stuff up.) On Friday, The Telegraph ran what has to be the dumbest, most egregious piece of writing on Africa of the 21st century. In an article titled…

In the fall of 1996, DJ Shadow blew minds around the world using materials he found in a dusty Sacramento basement. Four years later, the Avalanches did much the same from their headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing" and the Avalanches' "Since I Left You" were landmarks in…

by Share: In the history of cinema few actors have had the impact of Nicolas Cage. He’s had his highs and his lows, most certainly, but along the way he’s carved out a path that isn’t likely to ever be duplicated. Unfortunately, I think the general public as a whole may have lost sight of that fact.…

TORONTO — One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement. “I don’t know if they…

For decades, most American companies have paid their workers once every week or two, minimizing the administrative costs of frequent paydays and maximizing the interest the companies earn by keeping the money in the bank. And for equally long, workers have complained about the unfairness of waiting…

A Canadian man working on a dock in Stewart, British Columbia. The town is in the valley behind him. Stewart has an unusual fellowship with its American neighbor, Hyder, Alaska, which relies on many services from across the border, including electricity, and also uses Canadian currency. Jim…

SAN FRANCISCO — In Silicon Valley, where companies big and small are at work on self-driving cars, there have been a variety of approaches, and even some false starts. The most divergent paths may be the ones taken by Tesla, which is already selling cars that have some rudimentary self-driving…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. If you drive out to visit Disney’s Epcot center in Orlando, Florida, you will arrive at one of the biggest parking lots in America. With room for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out over 7 million square feet—about the size of 122 football…

I t’s 8.30am on a summer morning, and Nicolas Winding Refn is talking about necrophilia. Before we go on, it’s worth inserting a gentle content warning: the following conversation would have been tough to take at 10pm after half a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, never mind over breakfast in Soho. For Refn,…

Whenever people go from one place to another, they don’t think much about the roads and sidewalks that pass beneath them. But this infrastructure, known as the public right-of-way, doesn’t work by magic. It is managed and regulated by specific laws. People don’t own the roads they travel on, but…

John Travolta as Tony Manero, the character based on Nik Cohn’s Vincent, in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever.Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Picture it: a writer pens a magazine article and it’s an instant sensation. Producers come calling, he sells the rights for tens of thousands, the tabloids give him…

In addition to the longest period of peace and prosperity in modern European history, the E.U. has helped to create small rituals of international courtesy. PHOTOGRAPH BY NEIL HALL / REUTERS The news of the Brexit vote—for all that it had been obviously plausible for years, highly possible for…

RIO DE JANEIRO — IT’S official: The Olympic Games in Rio are an unnatural disaster. On June 17, fewer than 50 days before the start of the Games, the state of Rio de Janeiro declared a “ state of public calamity .” A financial crisis is preventing the state from honoring its commitments to the…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell The presumptive Presidential nominee of the Republican Party—let’s call him Donald Trump, though “Donald Trump” is more like it—has a way with words, after a fashion. The mouth moves and stuff comes out. (“That could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to…

Bjork Digital is almost Bjork: The Theme Park . The installation, which opened in Tokyo earlier this week, includes a movie theater featuring a two-hour-long showcase of the artist's videography. Around the corner from there, you'll find several tracks from the album Vulnicura have been transformed…

Ringer illustration In the Internet Age, monoculture is unachievable. But there remain a few things that we can all agree on.​ The Ringer is looking at this rarefied group all week. These are our Undeniables . Google Maps software engineer Andrew Lookingbill still remembers the night he and his…

BROWSERS, pieces of internet software that people probably spend more time with than they do in bed, have long been boring affairs. Save for occasional innovations such as tabs, these programs have remained fundamentally the same since the release of Mosaic, the first mainstream browser, nearly a…

In February 2010, falling prisoner numbers caused the country’s largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), to shutter its only facility in the state of Minnesota. The company knew that every day Prairie Correctional Facility in the rural city of Appleton would sit…