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…

EMERYVILLE, a tiny city of 12,000 lying on the eastern shore of the San Francisco bay, is rather cruelly known by residents of its bigger neighbours primarily as a place to buy furniture. A huge IKEA, a Swedish homeware shop, greets visitors to the city, which has no fewer than four shopping…

Going bankrupt, falling asleep, and falling in love can all happen at first gradually, then suddenly. Success can happen the same way — or at least that’s how it did for Anderson .Paak . The Oxnard, California, native, born Brandon Paak Anderson, has been a career musician for the better part of the…

Shoukath Ansari in Master of None . Photo: K.C. Bailey/Netflix The 2016 Emmy race has begun, and Vulture will take a close look at the contenders until voting closes on June 27. It’s not often in entertainment journalism that your subject can only talk between seeing patients. But then, Shoukath…

For a filmmaker starting from the bottom, a theatrical run can be a career-defining moment. And now, using a model like Tugg , you can actually afford it. When I embarked on making Brave New Wild eight years ago, I could care less about showing in theaters. Boy, have I changed my tune. I don’t have…

This article is part of Issue 8.5, a digital zine available to Kill Screen’s print subscribers. Read more about it here and get a copy yourself by subscribing to our soon-to-be-relaunched print magazine . /// Fullbright are best known for 2013’s iconic Gone Home . Their particular niche, now being…

Illustration by Joe Frontirre Universal Music Group is set to release a 20th anniversary vinyl edition of the motion picture soundtrack to the 1995 Alicia Silverstone comedy Clueless . This is a pretty strange move aesthetically given that in the mid-90s Beverly Hills world that Clueless inhabits,…

In the Internet Age, monoculture is unachievable. But there remain a few things we can all agree on.​ The Ringer is looking at this rarefied group all week. These are our Undeniables . N ew York, 1900. A doctor in a crimson-and-gold-hued Chinatown den kicks back in his fabulous white shoes — fly,…

TWENTY years ago a debate erupted about whether there were specific “Asian values”. Most attention focused on dubious claims by autocrats that democracy was not among them. But a more intriguing, if less noticed, argument was that traditional family values were stronger in Asia than in America and…

Archie McPhee. A mecca of nonsense. (Photo courtesy of Archie McPhee ) Handerpants, underwear for your hands! The internet’s favorite horse head mask! The librarian action figure with “Amazing Shushing Action!” Seattle’s Archie McPhee is one of the largest and oldest novelty designers and…

Photograph by Dimitri Otis/Getty Dear friends and family, Jen and I are utterly horrified to announce the arrival of our son, Jasper Heusen-­Gravenstein, born May 21st at 4:56 A.M. For nine long months, we've wondered who this little creature would be. Well, now we know: he's the living embodiment…

Imagine that you’ve started a new level in a game that sets the scene for endless opportunities. A new environment riddled with context clues that allow the player to consider their options on how to proceed—until an uninvited UI prompt coddles their decision-making and shatters the illusion of…

"This is going on too long," said a 30-something guy with a job in the film industry. "If we all get to know each other, nobody's going to even want to have sex." It was a warm, late June evening in the Hamptons, sky turning pink and orange at the horizon, and I was at that moment sitting in white…