After nearly two decades of marriage, David Grah and Mary Daniel, college sweethearts, divorced and have begun new lives. They agree that they are now better matched to others. Where did they grow up? HE: In an upscale San Francisco Bay Area suburb, the youngest of six children. His father was a…

In Unhitched, longtime couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward. Alec Cumming met Cynthia Harden in 1987, when she auditioned to play in his rock band. They married in 1991. For 15 years they collaborated musically, and raised a daughter. Not…

Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned another $8 million yesterday, basically dead even with Monday’s $8m gross. This brings its domestic total to $758.2m and puts it within $2.5m of Avatar ‘s all-time domestic grosses record, which means said record will fall sometime today, possibly as early as by…

King-Wei Chu has seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens three times, but he’s particularly looking forward to the fourth. The location is already determined: the Montreal Science Centre. Say what? Yup, the Science Centre is one of a handful of venues selected to show the film on celluloid. At the end of…

An Indonesian monkey that achieved Internet celebrity with a grinning selfie cannot own the photograph’s copyright, a federal judge said this week. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had argued in United States District Court in San Francisco that the rights to the photograph, which was…

Mike Reddy Email, ughhhh . There is too much of it, and the wrong kind of it, from the wrong people. When people aren’t hating their inboxes out loud, they are quietly emailing to say that they’re sorry for replying so late, and for all the typos, and for missing your earlier note, and for…

You know when someone “jokes” about something that actually makes you deeply insecure, and you’re forced to laugh it off because it would be awkward to do anything else? Imagine it happening for hours at a nationally televised award show, and that’s basically Ricky Gervais’s method of hosting the…

Photograph by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report )—Republican Presidential candidates ripped President Obama on Tuesday for what they called his stubborn insistence on linking gun violence with guns. In campaign stops across Iowa and New Hampshire, the G.O.P. hopefuls pounded the…

How does an astronomically expensive yet astonishingly successful science-fiction blockbuster by a world-famous director dominate popular culture for months on end, only to disappear without a trace from the public’s minds? That is the strange, half-enviable, half-unenviable fate of James Cameron’s…

F ull disclosure: I am a 36-year-old dude who bores easily, drinks I.P.A.s and wears sports-themed T-shirts, especially ones with faded, nostalgic logos that suggest better times. In my early 20s, I developed a gambling problem that I’ve since learned to spread out over a variety of low-stakes games…

TO outsiders, one of the puzzling aspects of the anti-government militia’s takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is its location. Twenty-five million birds a year visit the refuge in the high desert of southeastern Oregon, but few people have heard of it. Yet Malheur is a place of…

Twenty years after the football player's acquittal, John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr and the players behind FX's 'American Crime Story' reveal for the first time how their very 2016 rearview examination of the case reveals a whole other reality. Plus: Season 2's topic (Katrina) revealed. This story…

A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Chromeo . The strange history of this piece of equipments usage for both international…

BERLIN — The tensions simmering beneath Germany ’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or…

In a 1982 lecture that went on to be published as an essay called “Technologies of the Self,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that looking after oneself, rather than being a form of navel-gazing or narcissism, is a kind of “vigilance” that dates back to antiquity. For Socrates, Plato,…

Here is some useless shit I’ve bought myself since my dad had a stroke six weeks ago: Two pedicures, $30 each. Two massages, one barebones ($55), the other bougie ($115). Three pairs of nice $25 underwear, mostly for no reason but also because I have zero time to do laundry. Three blowouts, ranging…

Elena Scotti/FUSION Cecilia Bleasdale was mulling over an outfit for her daughter Grace’s wedding, at a Roman Originals store about 30 minutes outside of Liverpool in early February 2015. The 57-year-old snapped photos of three possible dresses and texted them to Grace. Bleasdale decided on the blue…

Over the past decade, advertisers have spent untold millions trying to turn Talia Kocar and her peers in the millennial generation into loyal customers. But on a recent afternoon in Santa Monica, Calif., in a kind of consumer torch-passing, Ms. Kocar, 25, watched a focus group of teenagers drink…

If you ever question the extent of American menswear’s New York bias just try to name a handful of Los Angeles based labels. If you’re actually able to hit number five, than you’re a better man than I, but regardless of how many brands you’re personally able to recall, it’s undeniable that when it…

To find one of the rarest fabrics in the world you don’t travel to the Italian countryside, or the Scottish Isles, rather you journey seven hours outside of Tokyo, to the Wakayama Prefecture. There on the southeastern coast of Japan you’ll find the Loopwheeler factory, one of the last bastions…

Giada Fiorindi / Quartz If you’ve ever found yourself buying clothes just because they’re cheap, or if shopping itself has become a form of entertainment for you, I’ve got a proposal: The next time you buy something, spend a whole lot on it. Enough that it makes you sweat a little. The point is to…

‘Get up at a normal time. Only highly successful masochists get up before 7am by choice.’Photograph: John Lamb/Stone/Getty R ight now, across the internet, approximately 12m articles purport to share the secrets of highly successful people : 2016 is a new year, and if you simply restructure your…

One of the greatest days to be a music fan is the day the Coachella poster comes out — not because we’re all going to this mythical desert party (though plenty of us are), but because it spells out, in the starkest terms available, the hierarchy of the entire music universe. You can tell how big an…

Peter Arkle Peter Arkle Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on December 30, 2015. The tips, however, are timeless. We rolled up our sleeves and combed through recent Styles stories, sorting through the many tips and tricks scattered throughout. On subjects like…

Sketch comedy has proved to be rich stomping ground when it comes to feature length projects. Between Saturday Night Live ’s many contributions to the big screen and even Kroll Show ’s recent foray into off-Broadway, there’s no limit to how comedians can develop these brief narratives into longer,…

Adam Savage, host of the tv show MythBusters , has a workshop in San Francisco’s Mission District. The walls and shelves—pretty much every surface, actually—are covered in movie and TV costumes and props, some actually used in filming and some replicas Savage acquired or made. Every time I go there…

Jim Young/Reuters Before Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes was published, her agent asked if she would talk to a woman named Tina Fey. Wiseman, a new mother, "had no idea who she was," but after a short conversation agreed to sell Fey the film rights to her book, which dissected…

Why the struggle for Ukraine is the key to Europe’s future Remembering the revolution The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. By Serhii Plokhy. Basic Books; 395 pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £25. ROWS over inheritances are bitter—within families and between countries. At the heart of the conflict…

Future War , by Christopher Coker , Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It’s on amazon UK and USA . Publisher Polity writes : Will tomorrow’s wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network…

Giving head to your handyman might be a porn cliché, but it's also a legitimate form of payment in some Dutch circles. Plumbers and house painters have long exchanged their services for sex in the Netherlands, according to professor Hendrik Wagenaar, who is working on a book about sex worker…

The traditional TV Industry should be in panic mode. Maybe it’s not a big deal that Netflix has an estimated 69 million subscribers worldwide and counting. Maybe it’s even a small thing that netflixers watch 100 million hours of video on the service every day. “Yea, but they don’t own enough premium…

Although the RIAA's 2015 mid-year recorded music revenues report showed that vinyl sales are outperforming streaming services , some commentators argue that the rise of interest in vinyl is a fad . Fad or not, Amazon's holiday sales figures, released on Monday, showed that their highest-selling…

FRANKFURT — Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe. But here in this city of 690,000 — less than the population of San Francisco, Uber’s hometown — the company recently did something unusual: It retreated. In early November, Uber shut its small office in Frankfurt’s…

What began as a small lawsuit brought by four former Uber drivers against the tech-titan just expanded into a potentially industry-crippling class action suit that could force the company to rethink its entire business model. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan first filed suit against Uber back in 2013,…

Talk Nerdy With Us recently chatted with Warren Ellis, the creative genius behind the new graphic novel Injection . Ellis is an award-winning writer best-known for Trees, Supreme: Blue Rose and Moon Knight . Read our interview below where we discuss Injection #6 which hits stores January 13th. First…

STOCKHOLM — Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote “Money, Money, Money,” considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins. Few places…

For an in-depth story on the quest to diversify the ranks of television directors , Variety spoke with dozens of industry professionals at all levels and at many companies, and is posting transcripts of a selection of those interviews. Lesli Linka Glatter has been one of the most in-demand directors…

What you make of Quentin Tarantino’s latest genre genuflection The Hateful Eight will really come down to one thing: how many times can you tolerate a woman getting hit in the face? The gauntlet is thrown down early: Kurt Russell’s ursine bounty hunter John Ruth smashes his captive, Jennifer Jason…