Illustration by Allan Sanders The remote-controlled “monster” jackhammer. The chloroform pillow. The mummy-reviver. The medicine cabinet that, when you open it, shoots a vitamin “bullet” into your mouth. The fast-growing strangle vine. The invigorating face-slapper. The mechanical insect that can…

Chocolate Coconut Cake By Melissa Clark 1 1/4 hours, plus cooling Trending Freds' Chicken Salad With Balsamic Dressing By Ginia Bellafante 45 minutes, plus roasting and cooling Trending Peaches With Zabaglione By David Tanis 30 minutes, plus chilling Trending Mediterranean Smashed Chickpeas By David…

O n a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid’s blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb…

Stephanie, a 24-year-old living in New York City, went over to a friend’s apartment one recent night for a laid-back night of watching Master of Non e on Netflix. When she got there, the friend offered her some wine, and they spent a few hours catching up. But on her way out the door, Stephanie was…

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker Late last year, Russian newspapers reported what would have qualified as a stunning piece of news almost anywhere else: The chairman of the country’s largest parliamentary body had been exposed as a plagiarist. Sergei Naryshkin, the former chief of staff in…

A month ago, Hillary Clinton had a big lead in national and battleground state polls. Today, she has a modest lead at best. A few surveys even show Donald Trump ahead. What happened? Mr. Trump has made gains in unifying his party’s base, while Mrs. Clinton has not done the same with hers. If…

This June, it will have been seven years since the official end of the “Great Recession,” which began in December 2007. Pundits and politicians continue to laud what US president Barack Obama called in February “the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” boasting of soaring stock prices and…

Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty Two weeks ago, Anita Hill, following an address that she delivered to a packed auditorium at the University of Connecticut, was asked how it made her feel to know that, despite her testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually…

Omar Bustamante/FUSION When Nicholas Herring's landlord informed him that he was being evicted so that his apartment could be converted into a full-time Airbnb rental, he was distressed but unsurprised. This is the way of things in Reykjavik now. Herring’s story is not uncommon. If you want an…

Here is something else that former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin can ponder as he sits in a federal facility at the edge of the Texas-Arkansas border, serving out the last seven years of a 10-year sentence for corruption: The feds didn't go looking for the evidence that set in motion his downfall. It…

Illustration: Greg Kletsel In Hollywood, the tweets and email alerts from industry trades trumpeting the announcements of superstar actors and showrunners attached to flashy TV projects roll out with almost numbing regularity now: Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange team up for FX, Amy Adams heads to…

The latest polls seem to signal that this historically weird race may be turning into an ordinary one, in which the parties matter more than the candidates. Photograph by Melina Mara / The Washington Post via Getty Here is a rough recent accounting of the relationship between Donald Trump and the…

Photo: Vincent Sandoval All internet campaigns to get an actor cast in a famous movie role are worthless. The egomaniacs running Hollywood studios don’t care about hashtags. But over the weekend something strange happened. James Bond fans searching for someone to replace Daniel Craig — the most…

Ayahuasca preperation. Photo via Wikimedia Commons Increasingly over the past decade, Westerners have flocked to the Amazon for a taste of the region's most notorious elixir: ayahuasca. In the jungle, the plant mixture is the "vine of the soul" or the "vine of the dead," depending on who you ask. In…

LOS ANGELES — Sony Pictures needs to keep male moviegoers interested in its “Ghostbusters” reboot after an Internet attack on its female cast. Hillary Clinton wants women to throw their support behind her presidential campaign. In a strange confluence, those agendas risk colliding this week on “The…

Manhattan directed by Woody Allen Interiors directed by Woody Allen Annie Hall directed by Woody Allen Woody Allen; drawing by David Levine Self-absorption is general, as is self-doubt. In the large coastal cities of the United States this summer many people wanted to be dressed in “real linen,” cut…

I've never been one for talking to myself, and by turn, interacting with Apple's virtual personal assistant program has always been something I avoid. The few interactions I had with her were limited to the times when I was drunk and fumbling with my phone, and the dreaded black screen and morphing…

10. “Pyramid Song” Amnesiac (2001) There was very little breathing room between the release of Kid A (October 2000) and Amnesiac (June 2001). The mystery surrounding the release of the latter was almost as great as the former. Would this be a return to their roots, or would they continue to go down…

“Influencer” is the biggest buzzword of the moment. An entire ecosystem has evolved around these social media stars, but there are cracks in the foundation. The relationship between brands, agencies and influencers is starting to get rocky . In this edition of Confessions , a social media executive…

Want to talk to MEL’s Essay Bot? Text “essay” to 203–872–5806 The phrase “bot hysteria” probably brings to mind a robo-apocalypse. But bots are being touted as the latest cure-all for consumer apathy and the ailing media industry alike. Amazon is selling millions of Alexa devices, a kind of audio…

U ntil Mark Zuckerberg arrived in a bright orange helicopter in October 2014, Chandauli had never seen a celebrity visitor. One of 44,795 villages in the state of Rajasthan, Chandauli is only three or four hours’ drive from Delhi, but it exists alone and forgotten, tucked away, a kilometre off a…

Share A glimpse into what it’s like making games in and around Stockholm. It’s August, 2015, and inside the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, a closing ceremony is taking place. It’s a summer Saturday afternoon and there are more than a hundred people inside the main…

JAN HERFKENS, a 25-year-old law student in Amsterdam, did not want to vote in the Netherlands’ recent referendum on the European Union’s trade deal with Ukraine. “We already have one big referendum,” he says, meaning the general election; he would rather elect representatives to handle policy issues…

A re-creation of the plutonium core that briefly went critical on May 21, 1946, resulting in the death of the Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin. Photograph courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory tucked into a…

In Rank Your Records , we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference. They couldn’t really sing. They couldn’t really play their instruments. Hell, sometimes they didn’t even have instruments…

Few rappers take as rigorous of an approach as Oddisee when it comes to creating music. His process for crafting an album goes like this: produce the beats, put them in the order they’ll be on the album, develop a theme for the album, then formulate the subject matter for each song working within…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell The American Presidency has developed an unfortunate resemblance not so much to an imperial throne, as some insist, as to the medieval papacy, with an obsessive pomposity of office producing all those hangar-size libraries and bricklike memoirs. We talk solemnly about…

Years ago, I worked on a reality show about a group of big-haired girls who ran a cutthroat skating school. They all had drinking problems, personality disorders, and boyfriends in a white rap group. Imagine three Tonya Hardings in one room, and you get the idea. To you, this may sound like sweet,…

It started as an apparent April Fool's Day internet joke. Not even one of the flashier ones. But it has since morphed into one of the most hilarious and profound existential comments on the entire internet, if not in all of human history. On April 1st, 2015, at exactly 9 AM Eastern time, an…

When Carolyn Burke landed a teaching job nearly three years ago at a charter school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn , she saw it as an opportunity to move back to her childhood neighborhood. This was where Ms. Burke’s parents, immigrants from Barbados, introduced her to art at the Brooklyn Museum ,…

Photo courtesy of the author It is 3:45 PM on a Wednesday and I am in a candle-lit room hugging a man who I have just met. His name is Steve Maher. We have been hugging for ten minutes straight. We are not on drugs. Steve is a certified Core Energetics practitioner who specializes in hug therapy.…

By Kevin Poulsen Typography by Michiel Schuurman One Thursday in January 2001, Maksym Igor Popov, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man, walked nervously through the doors of the United States embassy in London. While Popov could have been mistaken for an exchange student applying for a visa, in truth he was…

A 1904 illustration showing President Theodore Roosevelt wearing an elephant costume labeled “Republican Party.” Library of Congress Donald J. Trump has astounded the world, as he would be the first to tell you, leaving the Republican leadership to make the best of a terrible situation. Only months…

Clever tricks for beating the breathalyser (but not death) AT A bar off Langata road, a main highway in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, business has been struggling of late. The problem, the manager says, is that his bar is inconveniently positioned between two crossroads where officers from the police…

Before writing the most iconic theme song in the history of TV sitcoms, Jonathan Wolff was playing in studios during the day and jazz clubs at night as a young professional musician in Los Angeles. But his utility talents in the studio, a hard work ethic, and keen business savvy allowed him to build…

Kiruna, Sweden, in 2012. It is home to about 18,000 people. Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The northernmost city in Sweden, Kiruna, was back in the news this week with reports that it would be moving — yes, moving — about two miles east. And, for once, an unusual story from…

When a Venezuelan entrepreneur we know launched a manufacturing company in western Venezuela two decades ago, he never imagined he’d one day find himself facing jail time over the toilet paper in the factory’s restrooms. But Venezuela has a way of turning yesterday’s unimaginable into today’s…