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…

Dating “often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship,” Moira Weigel writes. Illustration by Alain Pilon Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man—call him John—on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he…

From left, Ryan Gosling, Daisy Tahan, Angourie Rice and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys.” Daniel McFadden/Warner Bros. Entertainment The climax of Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys” involves a hectic, gunfire-riddled chase through a crowded Los Angeles hotel in pursuit of a film canister…

Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters Share Share Things You Can Get in India With a Missed Call Want to transfer funds from your account? Give your bank a missed call. Want to hear Bollywood music? Dial a number and hang up. Making a missed call by calling a number and letting it ring is a popular way of…

Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined. Most of us have no difficulty recognizing luck when it’s on conspicuous display, as when someone wins the lottery. But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success…

I am terrible at sharing the bed. When my boyfriend travels out of town, my first thought is how much space I will take up in the bed while he’s gone. I know people who claim to sleep on their same side when their partners are gone, the place reserved for the body of their loved one like the seat at…

GOTHENBURG, Sweden — Arturo Perez used to come home frazzled from his job as a caregiver at the Svartedalens nursing home. Eight-hour stretches of tending to residents with senility or Alzheimer’s would leave him sapped with little time to spend with his three children. But life changed when…

level 1 HeyNomad Massachusetts 582 points · 2 years ago Wow. Thanks so much for this thorough write-up. I think I got most of this from watching along or accounts after the fact, but seeing the whole chronology, etc., really drives it home. This is so outrageous. I really hope the rumor of Nina…

PLAYGIRL If the success of the Magic Mike and Fifty Shades of Grey franchises have taught us anything, it’s that women ~love~ spending their free time watching nearly nude men perform for the camera. In fact, it’s safe to say some women can’t get enough . And yet, despite this demand and pop…

Political documentary ANTHONY WEINER, in case you did not know, is a retired congressman infamous for sending photographs of his genitals to women he had never met. The other thing you may know about Mr Weiner is that he is married to Huma Abedin, a long-time adviser to Hillary Clinton. What a…

Bernie Sanders’s resolve to continue his primary campaign despite delegate math that is heavily against him has many wondering whether his supporters will ultimately fall in line behind Hillary Clinton when the time comes. Photograph by Li Muzi Xinhua / eyevine / Redux In many hard-fought political…

Ever since Trevor Noah was announced as Jon Stewart’s successor as host of “The Daily Show” he has heard the same echoing line from Stewart supporters: “I served with Jon Stewart. I knew Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart was a friend of mine. Trevor Noah, you’re no Jon Stewart.” Channeling our own inner…

Illustration by Jean Jullien There are only a few television commercials from my childhood that remain vivid in my memory. Some of them stuck because they were selling products I wanted. At the top of my list was the Snoopy Sno Cone Machine: you stuffed ice in the plastic doghouse roof, then turned…

Share 21. May 2016 How close does personalized online advertising get to us as our real persons? Technology critic Sara M. Watson describes a disconcerting encounter with her other ME. By Sara M. Watson She is between the ages of 25–34. Or she’s under 32. She is a millennial. She’s inferred married.…