The need for energy alternatives was already clear to investors a decade ago, which is why they poured funding into clean technology during the early 2000s. But while the money was there, the technology wasn’t: The result was a series of bankruptcies and the scandal of Solyndra, the solar panel…

By Douglas Heaven Buttonmasher is our monthly column about video games, and how the way we play is changing A strawberry Christmas cake, sexy pants, a pool table, three red jet planes, a hippy bandana, a dog sled, a jetpack, a pair of Adidas trainers, a Tudor throne, a bullet stopped in mid-flight,…

Facebook, like many tech companies, uses the open-space office model. (Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images) A year ago, my boss announced that our large New York ad agency would be moving to an open office. After nine years as a senior writer, I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long,…

Stoya at home in New York.Photograph: Kate Black/Commissioned for the Guardian S toya says she couldn’t sleep. After arriving in Serbia on 18 November to begin work on a film, she had been woken by nightmares. Just one paparazzo waited for the internationally recognisable porn performer and writer…

Doug Mills/The New York Times All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international…

Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle. Sorry for the slightly less sexy headline. Mr. Zuckerberg is a co-founder of Facebook and a youthful megabillionaire. In…

Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price. It seemed too good to be true. On April 13, with reporters from the New York Times and NBC News hovering nearby, Dan Price, the young chief executive officer of Gravity Payments , a Seattle-based credit card processing company, told his staff he was…

War may never change, but Kill Screen does. Back our Kickstarter to help support our print relaunch! Fallout 4 takes us back. Back to the beginning. Back before the bombs fell, and before the world of the Fallout series took on its mutated, feral, apocalyptic form. But what did that world look like?…

Kent Hernandez/Fusion Law enforcement has been complaining for years about the Web "going dark," saying that encryption and privacy tools are frustrating their ability to track criminals online. But massive FBI operations over the last year that have busted 'hidden sites' used for the sale of drugs,…

The motto of the city of Detroit speaks to its resilience and tenacity: ‘Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus’, or, ‘We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From The Ashes’. Over the past century, this midwestern hub has fallen multiple times and picked itself up just as often. Drawing from this,…

My interview with Justin McLeod was winding down when I tossed out one last question: “Have you ever been in love?” The baby-faced chief executive had designed Hinge, which was a new dating app. My question was an obvious throwaway. Justin looked stricken. No one, he said, had ever asked him that in…

What can we do about all these school shootings?, teachers ask each other. Lock the doors, we’re told, and assume the worst is coming. (Michael A. Schwarz/For the Washington Post) Launa Hall is a teacher in Arlington, Va., and is working on a collection of essays about teaching. ‘Remember that…

Over the last few years, Mitch Glazer, the screenwriter and producer, has watched with awe and bewilderment what has happened to Bill Murray. Mr. Glazer has been friends with the actor for decades, and they have worked together on several projects, including “A Very Murray Christmas,” his Netflix…

Sixty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her courageous act is now American legend. She is a staple of elementary school curricula and was the second-most popular historical figure named by American students in a survey . When Republican presidential…

“My lively little kids stopped talking and adopted the bent-neck, plugged-in posture of tap, tap, swipe.” (Eugene and Louise/for The Washington Post) I placed an iPad into the outstretched hands of each of my third-grade students, and a reverent, tech-induced hush descended on our classroom. We were…

Another day, another ghastly shooting in America. So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting a day, according to the ShootingTracker website , counting cases of four or more people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed…

Alex Garland, Ex Machina , 2015 , digital video, color, sound, 108 minutes. Ava (Alicia Vikander). AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE gets bodied, the question on everybody’s tech vertical this year is: Should humans and robots have sex? The answer would seem to be no—obviously not. Thousands of years of…

About two weeks ago, we published our Reddit Ngram interactive — a tool that lets you search for any term to see how frequently it has been used in Reddit comments since late 2007. And readers (plus a few FiveThirtyEighters) have been sharing some interesting findings, especially on Twitter and, of…

Photo: Mitch Payne for The Wall Street Journal HENRY FORD WAS A smart guy but he never did the math when he decided to put every American household on wheels. A century after the Model T, the world has a problem with cars. The U.S. and China will consume about 40 million light vehicles in 2015,…

Omarosa Says the N-Word Apprentice Tape Is Real in New Book Former reality star/White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman made some explosive claims in Unhinged, her new tell-all book about her brief tenure in the Trump administration. According to an advance copies of the book obtained by the…

The singer-songwriter’s newest retrospective package highlights his enduring influence E arlier this month , Columbia/Legacy released Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 , the latest installment of The Bootleg Series , that spotlights perhaps the greatest creative period of the…

The year after my father died, I graduated from grad school, got a new job, and looked forward to saving for a down payment on my first home, a dream I had always had, but found lofty. I pulled up a blank spreadsheet and made a line item called “House Fund.” More From Our Partners The Post-Ownership…

On the Internet, the word “heartbreaking” is often used as a device to get us to click and gawk at remarkable tales of loss — the bride left at the altar, the long-lost family pet. On The Last Message Received Tumblr, the heartbreak doesn’t really need a headline to sell itself. The sorrow appears…

When Agnes Gund, the 77-year-old philanthropist and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, got the call, she thought: “That’s odd. What’s that got to do with someone like me?” When Fran Lebowitz, the 65-year-old author, got the call, she said, “I thought it was a joke.” And when Mellody…

Share With remasters in vogue and ports in the spotlight, we look at the art of transferring games to new hardware. Naughty Dog built its post-apocalyptic adventure The Last of Us for one of the most idiosyncratic pieces of gaming hardware ever designed. Released towards the end of the PlayStation…

This is Part 2. You won’t get Part 2 if you haven’t read Part 1 yet. ___________ PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) ___________ pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-| noun the action of ruining your own life for no…

This is Part 2. Part 1 is here . Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece. When we examined procrastination , we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like…

In most cities around the world, bars are at the core of the social scene and go hand in hand with youth culture. Which is weird, because this is a diagram that exists: The word “bar” can refer to a variety of places—a handy rule is, the cooler the bar, the more horrible the life experience it will…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and…

Photographs by Mark Seliger. Turtleneck, by Ermenegildo Zegna Last year, he was in an automobile accident so devastating, so spirit-breaking, it was difficult to imagine ever laughing at him again. Now, though, as he makes his defiant return to comedy, Morgan shares the grim and gritty of his…

ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus. I was horrified. All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent…

Melody sends a memo. Dear Tomorrow Corporation, I’m not one to write this kind of letter very often, but you are a special company. There’s something I feel I need to say. Something I feel is important. When I saw that you released your latest experience, Human Resource Machine , I purchased it…

Donald Trump said this to supporters at an Alabama rally: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” It was a…

Before last Thursday, I had no idea that Grumpy Cat was coming to San Francisco. And if someone had told me that less than 24 hours after learning about her impending arrival I would be in a conference room trying to ask her questions and sweating profusely, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have…

(Nintendo Game Play Counselor binder photo: portnoyd on imgur) With so many entertainment options available to consumers today, the bygone era of all-encompassing Nintendo mania in America seems quaint. During the late ’80s and into the early ’90s, the company’s characters were licensed for…

Skip to content 0 The Shop View Cart(0) Login × Looking for something? Type something to see the thing you're actually looking for Looking for something? Type something to see the thing you're actually looking for Recent Issues Issue one hundred twenty The Music Issue August/September 2018 read…

Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStocK/Getty Images You are an adult, a fully grown, perfectly competent human who has evolved beyond childhood silliness and adolescent surliness. So it’s really too bad that this is all going to go away the moment you enter your family’s holiday gathering this…

This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, 11 ← also click these Three quick notes: 1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here…

Polling may never have been less reliable, or more influential, than it is now. Illustration by Matt Chase “I am who I am,” Donald J. Trump said in August, on the eve of this season’s first G.O.P. Presidential debate, and what he meant by that was this: “I don’t have a pollster.” The word…

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker. Images by Maciej Noskowsk/Getty Images, courtesy of Footage Island. Every morning, like so many of her colleagues, a television writer would drive from her Hollywood apartment to the Culver City, California, lot of Sony…