Ask a question of David Cross or Bob Odenkirk — say, how’s it going? — and either can answer for both of them. “Collectively, we’re good,” Mr. Cross said in a recent telephone conversation with this comedy duo that pioneered a style of rapid-fire, absurdist and acidly cynical sketches on the HBO…

ISTANBUL — In a stunning electoral comeback, the Islamist party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regained its majority in Parliament on Sunday, ensuring Mr. Erdogan’s continued dominance of Turkish politics after months of political turmoil and violence. The result will permit Mr. Erdogan to remain…

T he following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr., we republished Rodley's chapter on the…

By on November 1, 2015 1:15 am Airbnb, the giant app-based hotel service, has disrupted housing markets and people’s lives in city after city. In response, many cities are cracking down, and that’s really a shame because Airbnb began as a good idea — it empowered “regular people” hosts, allowing…

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Erendira Mancias/FUSION Alicia Potters works at a pathology lab in Florida. It wouldn't seem like a particularly Instagrammable job. The clinic gets tumors, body parts, and human remains from doctors who hope the pathologists and their assistants will identify the maladies plaguing patients—or, more…

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I watch a lot of horror movies. Or, I did, at least. In the same way that at some point spicy food becomes the only type of food that certain people want to eat, or that a person continues to drink harder and harder alcohol until their liver fails, I hit a point midway through adolescence where I no…

How does a word become so muddled that it loses much of its meaning? How does it go from communicating something idealistic to something cynical and suspect? If that word is ‘‘diversity,’’ the answer is: through a combination of overuse, imprecision, inertia and self-serving intentions. Take the…

As President Obama approaches his final year in power, a political impasse over the Guantánamo prison appears increasingly likely to force him to choose between two politically unsavory options: Invoke executive power to relocate the remaining detainees in defiance of a statute, or allow history to…

Adrian Daub & Charles Kronengold | Longreads | October 2015 | 12 minutes (3049 words) Our latest Exclusive is by Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold , who recently co-authored The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford University Press), a cultural history of the Bond-song canon.…

How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses Soon, you’ll be able to go to the Olive Garden and order your fettuccine alfredo from a tablet mounted to the table. After paying, you’ll rate the server. Then you can use that tablet to hail an Uber driver , whom you’ll also rate, from one to…

How much money can you make from licensing your music — and is it really worth it? P ublic Enemy’s biggest hit record came in 2012, decades after what many would consider their prime. Although many hail their 1988 sophomore LP, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back as the greatest hip-hop…

via YouTube Last year, Seattle-based Gravity Payments’ CEO Dan Price established a $70,000-a-year minimum wage at his company. The announcement earned him attention from Hollywood reality-TV producers, requests to study his radical experiment from Harvard Business School, and Rush Limbaugh branded…

Alexander F. Yuan/Associated Press China ended its decades-old “one-child” policy on Thursday, announcing that all married couples would be allowed to have two children in a bid to reverse the rapid aging of the labor force. Here’s a look back at the policy as covered over the decades by The New…

In a symbolic blow to U.S. global financial hegemony, Russia and China took a small step toward undercutting the domination of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency on Tuesday when Russia’s second biggest financial institution, VTB, signed a deal with the Bank of China to bypass the…

Half of the bands we listen to wouldn’t exist without them. So who the hell did we think we were? October 27 marks the two-year anniversary of Lou Reed’s death (peace be upon him) and the Internet rightly overfloweth with tributes to his genius. Because everybody worships the Velvet Underground,…

Every holiday season, I experience movie-goers PTSD. I’m not kidding. My shoulders tense. My breathing quickens. When trailers play, I am struck with anxiety. I have flashbacks. I hear the Pointer Sisters singing and I have visions of a daffy Hugh Grant dancing down the stairs… And then it happens.…

Photo via Wallace Lake With Canadian artists occupying the top four spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the first time ever, it may seem like the Canadian invasion of the American music market is well underway. But while artists like Drake and The Weeknd have managed to break out of Canada and take…

You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II . When the medieval sorcerer pictured within the painting begins to physically manifest, it is on the…

Saul Bass at his desk. Photo by Steve Banks Graphic designer and Oscar-winning director Saul Bass worked with some of the most creative filmmakers in Hollywood to set the tone for their work through his unique title sequences for films ranging from Psycho to Goodfellas . In 1977, Bass sat down with…

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When director Hidetaka Miyazaki changed the focus from souls to blood in From Software’s Bloodborne (i.e., Dark Souls III) he made, not a creative shift in theme, but a good business decision. One item description in Bloodborne reads “blood defines an organism.” To construct a more honest truism,…

This arti­cle is part of our spe­cial series on Mental Health and Gaming , and was sup­ported by com­mu­nity fund­ing. If you want to help sup­port future fea­ture arti­cles and spe­cial series, please con­sider donat­ing to our Patreon . “ The mind of the sub­ject will des­per­ately strug­gle to…

…and how the fuck I ended up doing what I’m doing now We all have those “oh fuck” moments, when something falls apart, alters our whole trajectory, shakes the foundations of our world and makes you question “where the hell did I go wrong?”. I’ve had a few in recent years. If you’ve been following my…

T he Kansas City Royals may have lost last year’s World Series, but in the most indelible moment of the series — indeed, of the season — the Royals held the fate of the championship in their hands. With Kansas City down to its final out in Game 7, trailing by a run to Madison Bumgarner and the San…

Apple Apple just announced earnings for its latest quarter, and it was a huge miss on iPads. Apple sold 9.88 million iPads — a large number, to be sure. But that's 20% fewer iPads than it sold during the same time last year. Sales of iPads have been declining for several years now, which is one of…

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with…

Lasalle station. “Lasalle’s platforms, although very dimly lit, are full of vibrant reds, purples, and teals, contrasted with cement walls and cold metal benches,” Forsyth says. Courtesy of Chris Forsyth Montreal’s Metro was inaugurated nearly 50 years ago by then–Mayor Jean Drapeau , who held a…

M aybe never in your life do you meet an individual like Joe Rogan . He’s that singular, in a multivariate kind of way. For instance, most folks think of him only as the flapping-jawed, bug-eyed, hyperexcitable blow-by-blow commentator for all the Ultimate Fighting Championships’ fights since 2002,…

Earlier this week I watched some young musicians perform Lady Gaga songs in front of Lady Gaga. As India Carney’s voice rose and swooped during the incredible anthemic versions of her dance hits, Gaga sat enraptured. Her eyes moistened. Occasionally her arms would fling up in amazement. Finally, she…

From Uber to self-driving vehicles, what does the future of your commute soundtrack look like? F or many years , the presumed relationship between music and the automobile was that life was a highway, and they would be riding together all night long. Driving around on a nice day with the windows…

Elena Scotti/FUSION I start each day with a lie. I get up, walk into the bathroom, and weigh myself. The data streams from the Chinese scale to an app on my phone and into an Apple dataserver, my permanent record in the cloud. I started this ritual because I thought it would keep me honest. It would…

Between album jackets for Luna and Eels, his design for books by Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, his crisp New Yorker covers, and his poignant graphic novels, Adrian Tomine has established himself as one of the nation’s greatest and most versatile cartoonists. That's despite an understated…

It was unusually warm for late September, but Buddie didn’t seem to mind. As the mascot for a plan to legalize marijuana in Ohio, Buddie has a superhero’s physique, a green bumpy head, and a winning smile. Despite the heat, the woman on Buddie duty stood in the Oval, the center of academic life at…

Michelle Carter listens to defense attorney Joseph P. Cataldo argue for the involuntary manslaughter charge against her to be dismissed, citing five separate arguments at Juvenile Court in New Bedford, Mass., on Aug. 24. (Peter Pereira/The New Bedford Standard Times via AP) Michelle Carter knew that…

Sex on Campus The Game Is Rigged Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it. Photograph by Andrew Lyman SCAD class of 2016 Last winter, Reina Gattuso was a Harvard senior majoring in literature and gender studies and writing a biweekly column for the college…

The Social Network is Yesterday, The Interest Feed is Tomorrow Curation + Personalization In October 2011 I gave a presentation called The Race To Be Trusted . I was pulling on a thread handed to me by Andy Weissman regarding the evolution of Internet content distribution. In short: THE AOL ERA:…

Flickrnumi / Flickr There are new Pop Tarts, and they are Limited Edition. I know this because it says “Limited Edition” in bold red lettering inside a yellow banner that circumscribes the box . For an unspecified but finite amount of time only, Pop Tarts are available in a seasonal palette and…

As Europe continues to struggle with a steady flow of migrants and the challenges of how best to receive asylum seekers from war zones , The New York Times asked readers for their questions about the refugee crisis. We have addressed some issues and used other questions to help inform our reporting.…