My 16-month-old son was having a bad day. When he doesn’t sleep in the car, he usually points and babbles his approval of all the wonderful things babies notice that completely escape adult attention. On this afternoon, though, he was teething and hungry, a lethal scenario for an energetic youngster…

Kill Bin Laden. Screenshot of Kill Bin Laden, September 11 Digital Archive This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University , New America , and Slate . On Thursday, Nov. 12, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of the library. For…

It was with a raised eyebrow that I read Complex’s column titled “Why Did Everyone Claim to Enjoy Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly.’” In the midst of his “ Kunta’s Groove Sessions ” run, a couple of stories surfaced suggesting that Lamar was performing in half full arenas to somewhat fan flames…

The New York Times published a piece over the weekend about the political prospects of Bernie Sanders , a politician who apparently does not kiss enough babies : “[Sanders] rarely drops by diners or coffee shops with news cameras in tow, unlike most politicians. He hardly ever kisses babies, aides…

With over 800,000 followers, Essena O’Neill is an Instagram star. But Ms. O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian, recently surprised her fans by abruptly speaking out against social media. Changing her Instagram name to “Social Media Is Not Real Life,” Ms. O’Neill has denounced the artificiality of…

SAN FRANCISCO — Over the last few years, so-called sharing companies like Airbnb and Uber — online platforms that allow strangers to pay one another for a room or a ride — have established footholds in thousands of communities well before local regulators have figured out how to deal with them. Now,…

THE style icon Nan Kempner and Henry B. Platt, the Tiffany & Company chairman, were the society fixtures of 1970s Manhattan when Doubles, a private club in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, first welcomed the city’s elite into its distinctive red space. “When we opened, society was driven by a whole…

Walter Murch is synonymous with sound design . Before he came along, the audience, and much of the industry, took sound for granted; so long as a movie cohered into a polished whole, nobody thought much about the soundscape. Then, in 1979, “ Apocalypse Now ” hit theaters. Not only did it shatter our…

Of all the types of rock music, perhaps the one that is least considered and most overlooked is “college rock.” Like today’s “indie rock,” it was named for the circumstance of its proliferation, rather than some characteristic or aesthetic of the music (such as heavy metal, noise, punk, grind, et…

T he Apple ideology is sleek and clean. It proposes a lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where people — unburdened by the “fuzz” of possessions — are free to chase down every desire. Like a nomad on the Steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern. The room of the modern…

With the vinyl resurgence in full swing, how we store our records should also be considered We may be deep in a much ballyhooed vinyl revival but surprisingly, record cases haven’t seemed to have kept pace. With all these folks buying records again from their local record store Whole Foods, you…

One moment in the third Republican presidential debate encapsulates everything terrible about baby boomers and the way they’ve pillaged the U.S. economy. It came from Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Generation Xer, who offered the standard line — you can hear it from the mouth of almost any American…

Justin Bieber is leaning forward, eyes squeezed shut. “Jesus is God,” booms the pastor Judah Smith, standing before Bieber’s front-row seat in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire hotel. “He’s the relationship and the friendship you’ve been craving your whole life. If you believe that with all of…

It’s dangerous, I suspect, to draw too many lessons from the ignominious end of Grantland, the high-brow sports and culture site that ESPN shuttered this weekend, several months after parting ways with Bill Simmons, the site’s founder and editor-in-chief. Much of what transpired seems to have…

The iconic German filmmaker opens up about his new book, love for the WWE, saving Joaquin Phoenix’s life, and much more. Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times via Getty “I think I’m not one of those people who reinvents himself all the time,” Werner Herzog confided on a recent evening in Los Angeles as he…

Colors are tricky. If you’ve ever brought home a can of paint that you thought was taupe in the store but your partner points out looks “kinda pink” on the wall, you know how frustrating—and unreliable—color perception can be. Color systems like Japan’s TOYO Color Finder or Germany’s HKS Guide help…

In August 1963, Merloyd Lawrence wrote a dispatch in The Atlantic from Barcelona, mentioning many of the city’s cultural landmarks: the merchants on Las Ramblas, the food, and the buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, the “architect laureate of Catalonia.” After a disclaimer noting that many a…

By the end of their dinner at a small Italian restaurant in New York’s West Village, Leah is getting antsy to part ways with her boyfriend Ryan, so that she can go meet up with her boyfriend Jim. It’s not that she means to be rude, it’s just that Jim has been traveling for work, so it’s been a while…

At 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday in January, the massive main dance floor at Berlin’s Berghain is full. Dino Sabatini, an Italian DJ with short dark hair, is playing hard, hypnotic techno to a crowd of shirtless gay men, disheveled dudes in sneakers and tiny women with tiny backpacks. Many of these…

After the image of a Brooklyn student named Vidal captured widespread attention on the Humans of New York blog, he and the photographer, Brandon Stanton, were invited to the White House. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRANDON STANTON. COURTESY ST. MARTIN’S PRESS The most famous photograph from Brandon Stanton’s new…

Photo: Maria Jefferis/Redferns via Getty Images Over the last two decades, Neko Case has circled laps around a few different blocks. She's gone from the small-town fables and old Tacoma roads of her early country albums, like 1997's The Virginian and 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby , to the deeply…

STS-116 astronauts installed part of the space station's main backbone in 2006. NASA In the movie The Martian , a stranded astronaut is able to survive for years in a habitat that NASA originally designed to last 30 days. The movie is fictional, but the premise is not so far from reality: a lot of…

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — During the filming of “By the Sea,” Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt — who play a depressed former dancer and her blocked novelist husband — had a go-to method for lightening an often somber mood on the set. “There were a lot of jokes about how nobody is ever going to want…

If you stay in the game long enough, you eventually have to be called a living legend. The expression is basically meaningless though. It’s like an honorary degree. It has no actual value. Usually, it just means you’re old. But Bill Murray is one of the 8 or 9 people actually deserving of the title,…

The Beatles: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, circa 1964 | Archive Photos/Getty Images GRAMMY-winning producer Danger Mouse draws inspiration from the Fab Four By Danger Mouse I didn’t grow up on the Beatles. In fact, by the time I got to college I couldn’t have named…

A way of experiencing music that simply can’t be accomplished via digital means I’ ve always taken a resigned , even fatalistic, view toward accumulating music. There’s so much must out there, you can’t expect to hear it all or have an encyclopedic knowledge of any genre, much less the entire canon…

A woman shows a badge bearing the face of Selahattin Demirtaş, leader of the Peoples’ Democratic party, during an election rally in May. The party went on to win 80 seats in the Turkish parliament.Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images I n the autumn of 1990, six years into the Kurdistan Workers…

The year is 2108, and things aren’t going so well for Team Humanity. Earth is so overcrowded that people live in hive-like concrete cubicles called Public Residence Clusters and subsist on reconstituted soy. Things aren’t much better 30 light years away, in Earth’s run-down Outer Colonies. No wonder…

Asier Marzo, Bruce Drinkwater & Sriram Subramanian Holograms aren't just for stage shows anymore. A group of scientists have figured out how to make holograms out of sound waves . What's more, they say they can use these next-generation holograms to levitate and control tiny objects, according to a…

The night before I enter Iran, a sliver of a moon hangs suspended opposite the cloud-shrouded peak of Mount Ararat, barely illuminating the Turkish border town of Dogubeyazit. This dusty part of the world is sliding rapidly into the longest, hottest days of summer. The new moon heralds the beginning…

How misfits lost the midnight movie It’s midnight in Hobart, Indiana, and the auditorium of the cozy, single-screen Art Theatre is echoing with the sounds of cartoon characters in the throes of passion. One orgasm follows another — first Marge Simpson then Bugs Bunny — as first-time attendees to the…

This post originally appeared on Wait But Why. Say hi to Lucy. WaitButWhy.com Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I…

For over twenty years, a video game has tormented mums, dads and office workers the world over. And it has nothing to do with orcs, racecars or terrorists. This story was originally published in October 2010. It has been updated. It’s about cards. That game is Windows Solitaire , which from Windows…

Sometimes writers mourn the loss of “ the web we lost .” They get sad about blogs. They remember a time before Facebook. They sigh and sip their pour-over. I believe in the motivating power of nostalgia. It can often move people to conserve ideas and objects that are of value. But I believe, too,…

On Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of quarterly earnings. While the company beat investor expectations, it’s still running at a loss of $132 million after taxes . Its fourth-quarter projections seem low. Worst of all, its namesake product has essentially failed to add any active…

On Friday, Kanye West’s seventh album, Yeezus , was revealed to the world. In celebration of this holy event, members of the Grantland staff seized one song each and reflected upon its beauty, truth, and awesomeness. Or made jokes about it. 1. “On Sight” Chris Ryan: If this is your first time…

App attack "The future of TV is here." It is not the world’s most understated tagline for a new product, especially one from Apple. If you want to set sky-high expectations around a new TV product after years of rumors and sly winks and shelved plans, well, that’s exactly how to do it. You say that…

Since about 1:45 pm on Friday, October 30 th , 2015, I’ve been cycling through a handful of emotions. Grantland is shutting down, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but when any family member passes (and yes, I’m labeling Grantland as a member of my family), it doesn’t matter how much time you’ve been…