On Sunday, August 23, Tyler, the Creator, was riding through France on the nicest tour bus he’d ever rented—a giant TV screen, a circle couch, extra beds—and heading towards the end of what was meant to be a month-long tour of Europe, reveling in the amenities his hard work had afforded him. The…

ILLUSTRATION BY KRIS MUKAI [audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221754909"] M E : I need you to buckle up back there, buddy. M Y NEPHEW : Why? M E : I just do. M Y NEPHEW : Why? M E : Because I want you to be safe. M Y NEPHEW : Why? M E : Because I care about you. M Y NEPHEW : Why? M E :…

America’s debate over how to fund sports stadiums hits critical mass in Cleveland, Ohio Downtown Cleveland, a cold Thursday morning. We’re all watching these workers sort of mindlessly pull themselves up and down the facade of a federal building in this midwestern city. We’re waiting. A wind lifts…

Harriet Cleveland’s troubles began with traffic tickets. When she couldn’t pay her fines, she was sentenced to two years’ probation with Judicial Correction Services, which added its own fees. Her debts soon mounted. Photograph by Jessica Dimmock / VII On a cold November afternoon, Harriet…

Jay Kirk | Harper’s | March 2002 | 29 minutes (7,333 words) This essay by Jay Kirk first appeared in the March 2002 issue of Harper’s, where it was edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Our thanks to Kirk for allowing us to reprint it here. *** For a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying…

How Billy Mitchell became a video-game superstar and achieved Pac-Man bliss B illy Mitchell, the most knowledgeable and masterful Pac-Man player ever to drop a quarter in a machine, is a hard man to find. When I asked one of his best friends, Walter Day, the best way to get in touch with him, Day…

Kickstarter genius Lawrence Shepherd and an unnamed woman. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Shepherd Did you recently waste money on an ironic Kickstarter campaign to make potato salad ? Well, first, Paypal used the money you apparently can't wait to get rid of. Secondly, fuck irony. There are people out…

Roby So (left) and Carlos Cervantes in Pomona, Calif. Credit Damon Casarez for The New York Times T wo men were sitting in a parked car, waiting to pick someone up. Carlos Cervantes was in the driver’s seat. He was 30, with glassy green eyes — quiet by nature, but with a loaded, restrained intensity…

Credit Basil Childers for The New York Times By CHIOS, Greece — The rickety raft made of empty oil drums and a wooden tabletop rolled and pitched with the waves while tied to the side of the Dona Liberta, a 370-foot cargo ship anchored far from land in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa. “Go down!”…

Spiny grass and scraggly pines creep amid the arts-and-crafts buildings of the Asilomar Conference Grounds, 100 acres of dune where California's Monterey Peninsula hammerheads into the Pacific. It's a rugged landscape, designed to inspire people to contemplate their evolving place on Earth. So it…

SONGKHLA, Thailand — Lang Long’s ordeal began in the back of a truck. After watching his younger siblings go hungry because their family’s rice patch in Cambodia could not provide for everyone, he accepted a trafficker’s offer to travel across the Thai border for a construction job. It was his…

Mothers Of ISIS Recruits Fight Their Own Battles Back Home Julia Ioffe In Calgary , between the soccer practices and the hours at her accounting job and the potlucks with the neighbors, Christianne Boudreau spent every spare minute watching Islamic State videos, her nose pressed up against the…

Ivory Mae bought the house in 1961, for thirty-two hundred dollars. She was nineteen, mother to three, and already widowed. To her, the area was the country. Illustration by Richard McGuire In early spring, before the Jane magnolia tree bloomed, I set off to close the distance between the me of now…

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed Richard Feynman, the physicist, was once asked : "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?" He…

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune. Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen. Photograph by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the…

MTV At the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West gave a speech that was, arguably, the highlight of the night. In his speech, West talked about art, artists, truth and the future, and announced that he was planning to run for president in 2020. Here's the full text of West's speech, so you can…

By Margaret Atwood Animations by Carl Burton Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our co-conspirator, the sine qua non in all we do! Can’t live with it, can’t — right at this moment — live without it. But it’s on everyone’s mind. Back in 2009, as…

Photograph by Justin Bishop. It’s a balmy night in Manhattan’s financial district, and at a sports bar called Stout, everyone is Tindering. The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing money and deals on Wall Street all day, and now they’re out looking for hookups. Everyone is…

Vit Jedlicka raising the flag of Liberland in the middle of the Danube. Credit Antonin Kratochvil/VII, for The New York Times 1. The Proclamation Along the western bank of the Danube, more or less halfway between Zagreb and Belgrade, there rests in historic obscurity a three-square-mile teardrop of…

Zach and Jess love horror movies. Zach and Jess love videogames. Until Dawn, a game that has been gestating since 2012, promises to blend these two things together. By combining motion-captured actors and choose-your-own-adventure-style gameplay, Until Dawn wants very much to be a Cinematic Horror…

It’s been less than a year since “ Citizenfour ,” Laura Poitras ’s unflinching look at Edward Snowden ’s final days before blowing the whistle on NSA surveillance, premiered at the New York Film Festival and then won the Best Documentary Oscar. The journalist turned filmmaker, now up for four…

I n the 1960s, it was estimated that half the households in the US had a Polaroid camera. Used by families, professional photographers, police and fire fighters, and for passports and ID cards, the technology was all the rage for its instant prints. But in 2008, the Cambridge-based company shut its…

When was the last time you saw a website that didn’t have a huge image fitting to the screen with some giant text overlaid on it? Scroll down a little and you’ll be greeted with either another full width panel, this time a solid colour with centred text sat in it, or a bank of 3 columns with icons…

The great thing about looking at data is that it can answer any question you ask. The problem is that it won’t tell you whether it’s the right answer -- or even the right question. In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine , author Steven Johnson wrote a piece, "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,"…

i Ian MacKaye knows that I cannot look him in the eye. He shows me around a cluttered corner of Dischord House – the storied home of his record label since 1981 – and lets me peek inside the kitchen. The wall behind him rises like a cluttered tomb, enveloping him in a monument to vinyl. Every…

The morning newscast from WDBJ the day after Alison Parker and Adam Ward, two of the station’s employees, were shot during a live broadcast. Away from the world for August, in a house without Internet or television and only spotty, the-satellite-must-be-passing-over phone reception, I was, until…

Photo: Getty Images The tiny islet of Riddarholmen, home to a 13th-century church full of entombed Swedish royalty, is an oasis of dead calm in cosmopolitan Stockholm, an odd place to witness the relaunch of an international phenomenon. But it happens to host the headquarters of Norstedts, the…

Dreamstime Surely, this is the best thing to ever come of democracy: the city government of Columbia, Missouri, tried to subvert the democratic process by creating a new district where no one was registered to vote and the decision to implement a much-desired sales tax would default to property…

iOTA, the flame-throwing guitar hero from this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, proves that there will always be work for musicians, even after the bombs fall How artists and musicians are finding careers that didn’t exist before the rise of the internet Last weekend , the New York Times ran a piece…

Getty Images At the Dusseldorf airport, robotic valet parking is now reality. You step out of your car. You press a button on a touch screen. And then a machine lifts your car off the ground, moving all three tons of it into a kind of aerial parking bay . Built by a German company called Serva…

Ashana Bigard was born in New Orleans, went to school in New Orleans, and had her children in New Orleans. Just before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, she worked at an organization called Agenda for Children, where she was a parent coordinator and all-around community activist. She wasn’t making a…

NOTE: This article was written before Ramos’ encounter with Donald Trump in Iowa on Tuesday. Let’s imagine for a moment the kind of country that Donald Trump, the leading Republican presidential hopeful, wants America to become if he’s elected. “Trumpland” would feature a 1,954-mile-long wall along…

She ate little. She held the baby. She took her pills. Howard helped her to take them. She slept with a poster-size photo of Daniel. In February, they flew to Hollywood, Florida, to pick up a boat they’d purchased. They checked into the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Anna Nicole was suffering from a…

From Jane’s Addiction to Body Count, music censorship swelled in the early 1990s Certain intersections of certain cities at certain time have a certain aura about them. The hippie movement had San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the 60s. During the 1970s, New York punks took over Bowery and 2nd in…

Lucas Jackson / Reuters “It was the terrific leader of India, Gandhi, who said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win.’ Well we won, didn’t we?” That’s how President Donald John Trump began his inaugural address, that clear morning in January of…

Bot vs. human Web traffic distribution. Incapsula With much trepidation, I must report that there is a pretty good chance that half the visitors to this story will not be human. According to a recent study by Incapsula, more than 61 percent of all Web traffic is now generated by bots, a 21 percent…

Elena Scotti/FUSION A friend recently came to me with a problem: He was chatting with a sexy blond woman on Tinder and couldn't tell if she was a real person. For the past two days he had been talking with her under the assumption she was a carbon-based life form, but then he started to question her…

This story posted on Facebook is from a Burner who worked as a Sherpa this year at a multi-million dollar camp. We will keep the Burner’s identity anonymous unless they request otherwise. It is a fascinating, some might say shocking, inside look at the fancier side of Black Rock City. “What!? You…