Thirty years ago the international development community was ecstatic. It had found the perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries: microcredit. The popularizer of this new strategy — which consisted of providing small loans to the poor so they could launch self-employment…

Credit Illustration by Robert Sammelin E arly one weekend morning in January 2014, Janet was sleeping fitfully in her parents’ home in Toronto. A junior studying elementary education at a nearby college, she had gone home for the weekend in a state of nervous collapse. For months, someone going by…

“I was angry after Charlie Hebdo,” one Parisian said. “Now I am désespéré.” Illustration by Christoph Niemann At half past nine in the evening, on Friday, November 13th, Matthieu, a thirty-three-year-old resident of Paris, was eating dinner outside with friends at Le Petit Cambodge, a restaurant in…

Chicago is a city rooted in communal isolation. Separation runs through our blood and muscles. Segregated bodies are the connective cultural tissue that citizens—political "leaders" and business owners and everyone else—use to define our ills. It makes Chicago "work." If we isolate the problem,…

Victor Biro. Photos by Jake Kivanc Heavy rainfall spatters down on the windshield of Victor Biro's mid-2000s minivan as we sit in a parking lot near Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square. The LED billboards flashing in the distance paint the water running down his windshield different colours as his EMS and…

On many songs, a love interest acts as a stand-in for a public that has turned on him, demanding apologies and repentance. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad There is no greater opportunity for a pop star than repentance—the chance to rise again after a self-inflicted downfall. Much of Kanye West’s…

 Condé Nast Traveler Subscribe Close  Trending Places See All Miami Hong Kong Barcelona Chicago Get the magazine Plus 2 free gifts! Subscribe Get the magazine The ultimate source of travel inspiration plus 2 free gifts Subscribe International Order Give as a Gift Stay Here by Ken Jennings November…

Adele will release her highly anticipated third album, “25,” this week. Photograph by Matt Sayles / AP At twenty-seven years old, Adele is the most popular living soul singer in the world. When she performs before a crowd, she eschews all the historical trademarks of the style—she rarely improvises;…

BORDENTOWN, N.J. — The machines at Independent Record Pressing whirred and hissed as they stamped out a test record. The business’s owners waited anxiously for Dave Miller, the plant manager, to inspect the still-warm slab of vinyl. “That’s flat, baby!” Mr. Miller said as he held the record, to…

What Your Music Format Says About You Considering the current preponderance of formats—including vinyl, streams, CDs, and cassettes—how we listen to music can now seem just as revealing as what we’re listening to. By Joel Oliphint. by Contributor Longform Rock Electronic November 9 2015 If…

Elena Scotti/FUSION “Why, when we’ve seen people burnt alive, murdered in ways that you wouldn’t butcher an animal, does this resonate so much?” an Iraqi-American scholar told Boston Globe correspondent Thanassis Cambanis earlier this year, choking through words while speaking about how ISIS members…

Let’s Build a Home: Third Man Records Returns to Detroit Ten years after leaving Detroit for Nashville, Jack White and his Third Man label are heading back to the Motor City with a new record store (that also happens to be a vinyl pressing plant) and a renewed desire to pay homage their hometown's…

A truck delivers raw tar sands for processing at the Suncor tar sands mining operation near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Todd Korol/Reuters/Corbis Alberta is sometimes called the Texas of Canada. It’s home to one of the largest rodeos in the world, a respectable number of annual tornadoes, and a…

A good video game menu is like a good roadie: It stays out of the way. But still, far too many menus waste far too much of our time. People want to play games, not mess around in menus! We’ve gone up to the top of Video Game Mountain in search of answers, and have come down with ten rules all video…

MusicFeature To celebrate the Icelandic star’s 50th birthday, we trace all the times she graced us with her ever-evolving presence – all the way back to 1995 21 November 2015 Text Amy Newson Our favourite Icelandic songstress is turning 50. Quite unbelievable really, as it feels like only yesterday…

We are at the point in Donald Trump’s campaign when it’s difficult to decide whether to focus on his unconstitutional policy proposals or his blatant lies. I mean, this is just from yesterday: Quite a news day for @realDonaldTrump . pic.twitter.com/K4EWCjuR4Q — ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) November 22,…

Nick Cannon in "Chi-Raq." | Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios This just in: Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” isn’t a broad comedy that makes light of the tragic levels of violence in Englewood, nor is it a gratuitous slam at our great city. It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down…

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave thousands of supporters a heaping dose of red-meat at his Monday evening stop in Atlanta. But the Democratic presidential candidate was rivaled by the man who introduced him: Rapper Killer Mike. The two lunched together at the Busy Bee before the hip-hop star - real…

T here were a lot of tributes after the horror in Paris . It has to be said that Trafalgar Square is an odd choice of venue to show solidarity with France; presumably Waterloo was too busy. One of the most appropriate tributes was Adele dedicating Hometown Glory to Paris, just as the raids on…

Paul Hollywood, Sue Perkins, Mel Giedroyc and Mary Berry with 2015’s Bake Off contestants.Photograph: Mark Bourdillon/BBC/Love Productions/Mark Bourdillon T he season finale of The Great British Bake Off was the third most popular programme on television last year – outflanked only by two World Cup…

Phil Toledano I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without…

“He’s gotta convince people that three Bushes are not one too many,” one rival says. Illustration by André Carrilho On Friday, October 2nd, Jeb Bush was onstage at a college auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, for a public interview with Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general and a…

Right now, we’re in a car, hanging on for dear life as we hurtle around a mountain bend. If we don’t hit the brakes soon, we’re going to lose control, crash through the guardrail, and careen into the abyss. We’ve been fully warned about the danger ahead, but now here we are, testing our fate.…

AP Photo An Islamic State flag in Sadiyah, Iraq, November 2014 The shock produced by the multiple coordinated attacks in Paris on Friday—the scenes of indiscriminate bloodshed and terror on the streets, the outrage against Islamic extremism among the public, French President Francois Holland’s vow…

On the night of the Paris attacks, Rurik Bradbury noticed an inevitable and tiresome trend popping up on Twitter. “I think I saw a professional news organization tweet about the lights of the Eiffel Tower being turned off in memory of the victims,” recalled Bradbury, the New York-based CMO of a…

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American…

Enlarge Reality is mutable, vulnerable to interpretation and interference. It’s an idea that permeates through Philip K. Dick’s writing, one of the most influential forces in pop culture. Even if you don’t recognise his work by name, chances are you’ve experienced its impact. Minority Report , Blade…

Hanover, N.H. — SURVEYING the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris, most Americans probably feel despair, and a presentiment that it is only a matter of time before something similar happens here. Even as Americans have felt the pain of the French, they have worried, not surprisingly,…

‘There is discernible method in the Isis approach.’ Islamic State fighters in Raqqa.Photograph: AP I t’s “the first of the storm”, says Islamic State . And little wonder. For the chaotic scenes on the streets of Paris and the fearful reaction those attacks provoked are precisely what Isis planned…

For John Chase, the breaking point came on Jan. 7, when al Qaeda-linked militants gunned down 12 people at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo . Subsequent attacks by a gunman affiliated with the Islamic State would take five more lives. Watching triumphant jihadi messages bounce across Twitter, the…

The first level in Call of Duty: Black Ops III is about torture. As a Special Forces soldier in a grim future, the player is to extract a political official from a secret prison. As you infiltrate the facility, the game showcases gruesome scenes of waterboarding, beatings, and a unfortunate souls…

A member loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) waves an ISIS flag in Raqqa. (Reuters / Stringer) No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I…

A former staff writer describes how a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency failed its female employees. The following story — on the treatment of female editors, writers, and managers at Gawker Media — was scheduled to appear on Gawker.com on Friday, November 13. It had…

Photographs by Inez + Vinoodh The leader of the free world sits down with the free agent of the year—HBO’s Bill Simmons—to discuss the Obama era and beyond. The exclusive White House Q&A There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the…

Kathleen Kennedy has heard a lot of movie pitches. For decades she worked with Steven Spielberg, producing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , the Indiana Jones series, the Jurassic Park series. You get the picture. So it probably wasn’t a surprise—it was cool, even—when, right after Kennedy took over as…

C olin Trevorrow’s Hollywood fairy tale started at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The bespectacled, bearded director, then 35, came to Park City, Utah, with an endearingly quirky time-travel romantic comedy executive-produced by the endearingly quirky Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, and…

F rom six in the morning until five in the afternoon, five days a week, for thirty years, my Grandmama Catherine’s fingers, palms, and wrists wandered deep in the bellies of dead chickens. Grandmama was a buttonhole slicer at a chicken plant in central Mississippi—her job was to slice the belly and…

The independent video store where I've worked for 15 years is finally dead. After 28 years in business, we succumbed to the "disruption" of Netflix and Hulu, bled to death by the long, slow defection of our customer base. Once we announced our closing, the few who remained mourned — then we locked…