(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com ) In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. “Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties,” the former CIA officer writes in Circle of…

SASIMOTO / Shutterstock / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic On Aug. 18, 2011, a thread titled “I design tampons. AMA!” appeared on the news-conversation website Reddit. Hosted by a user named “karnim” who identified himself only as a college-aged male research-and-development intern at one of the “big…

Research In Motion’s Jim Balsillie, left, and Mike Lazaridis in 2006. Photo: Norm Betts/Bloomberg News Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw the televised report about Apple Inc.’s AAPL 0.79% newest product. Research In Motion ’s BB 1.36% founder soon forgot about exercise that day in…

Production company DPPLR created a (vintage) sci-fi short called Rotor about a security guard in an eerie factory that spots an intruder on one of his monitors. The plot somewhat reminds us of Moon in which a guy on the moon discovers different versions of himself. DPPLR made the film for the fun…

Editor: When software developer Brad Isaac told us he had productivity advice from Jerry Seinfeld, we couldn't turn down the chance to hear more. Read on for the whole story from Brad. Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was…

I love documentaries. I can watch a documentary about anything. But I didn’t have much interest in this one —I’ve had my fill of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana bios and documentaries, and stopped reading and watching them a long time ago. I don’t have a lot of happy memories about any of that stuff, and…

How a veteran turntable technician embraced DJ technology By DJ Rob Swift T he first time I saw someone using a laptop to DJ was around 2001 at a DJ school. The X-Ecutioners had been invited as guests and already the idea of going to a DJ school and people paying to be taught how to DJ tripped me…

Apple’s Eddy Cue high fives Drake during the Apple Music introduction at the Apple WWDC on June 8, 2015 in San Francisco Apple wants to be the music kingmaker. Is that possible in the Internet age? I had long imagined Apple’s introduction of a streaming music service. It’s been clear for years that…

“Capturing the Friedmans” (2003) In the summer of 1987, parents in a quiet Long Island suburb got a rude awakening: Their kids’ extracurricular computer teacher had been arrested for pedophilia. Immediately, disturbing stories began to emerge of children being forced into bizarre sex games in the…

72 The 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven left me confused, enthralled, and feeling the need to upgrade my threads. This is the goal for most heist movies: the audience should be as dazzled as the in-film mark, hoodwinked but with begrudging respect. The missteps should be uncloaked as part of the plan…

More from the archives, this time a 2007 piece on the dark eroticism inherent in The Sims, penned by the sorely-missed RPS co-founder and giant of words Kieron Gillen. It was the phone calls that made me certain. The Sims was going to cross over, one way or another. I worked in a cramped games…

A mysterious little book called Iterating Grace is floating around San Francisco right now. At least a dozen people have received the book in the mail—or in my case, by secret hand-delivery to my house . (Which is a little creepy.) The artifact itself consists of a 2,001-word story interspersed with…

Photo by 4774344sean/Thinkstock No judgment, but you waste a lot of time on the internet, right? Which means sometime in the past year or so, something like this happened: You’re on Facebook, and you see that a friend has shared an interesting-looking article, such as a map of the United States with…

Forgotify.com A home for the unloved tunes of Spotify Awhile back, Lane Jordan heard an interesting fact : Spotify, the streaming music service, said that 20% of the songs in their catalog had never once been played. That got Jordan, an interactive art director, feeling inspired — and so, along with…

Is it possible an unknown, one-woman toy-reviewing YouTuber called "Disney Collector" is making more money than most CEOs? Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed To 3-year-olds, she is an obsession. To their parents, a mystifying annoyance. To YouTube marketers, an elusive moneymaker no one's been able to tap for…

“One thing is for sure,” declared an influential American critic and record industry analyst, Bob Lefsetz, in a recent post on the topic of streaming music. “One service will dominate, it’s where we’ll all go, because we want to share, we don’t want to be left out.” Music is now undeniably an…

I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a…

Seventy miles northwest of Orlando International Airport, amid the sprawling, flat central Florida nothingness — past all of those billboards for Jesus and unborn fetuses and boiled peanuts and gator meat — springs up a town called Wildwood. Storefront churches. O’Shucks Oyster Bar. Family Dollar.…

“Want to meet at my dorm? Less carrying for me.” Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. the international sensation “mattress girl,” is emailing from her phone in her Columbia University dorm high up over Morningside Heights, where she lives in a single room within a six-person suite. “My friends and I got the…

Computers at Google now have a machine-learning system that can analyze images like the one above and generate captions for them. The phrase used to caption this image? “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road.” It might not seem like much, but it’s actually one hell of an accomplishment. First,…

D anny Ray Davis wasn’t just a fisherman, he was a champion. You’d know that had you ever seen him around Grand Prairie, Texas. They say he always wore the prize “$50,000 Winner” silk jacket he got for taking down the 1983 Texarkana Labor Day bass tournament. Davis was known as someone with a lot of…

S he tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore. “It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'” Fleischmann is a tall, thin,…

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE Captain Nick Sloane, salvage master, on the scene in Giglio, Italy, last summer; on the left, the cruise ship Costa Concordia two weeks before it was refloated., Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson. Every ocean voyage involves risk. This has always been, and will always be.…

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer ​ , the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of…

Published on June 3, 2015 NO ONE, LEAST OF ALL PRESIDENT OBAMA, had expected the conversation to take the turn that it did. The president, his speechwriter and a few top aides were supposed to be discussing Obama’s upcoming speech in Selma, Ala., in early March. Instead, they were talking about…

Few cultural symbols have as much heft as the "traditional" nuclear family. You know the one: two heterosexual parents, two kids, one dog, two tablespoons of white picket fence, whisk gently. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that—it's just not how I was raised. My parents are…

Mark Kozelek: ‘Wait ’til you see me up there [on stage]. You’re gonna be like a cat in heat.’ Photograph: Taylor Hill/Getty Images “Y ou think you’re the only person who wants to get a face-to-face interview with me? Get in line. I’m the best person you never met and one day, if you ever meet me,…

Photo credit: Christie Allen Mirror Mirror Photography Last Friday, part of Bill C-24 went into effect, officially creating a two-tier citizenship system. As a result of this new law, dual citizens and people who have immigrated to Canada can have their citizenship taken away while other Canadians…

Pronounce the word artist , to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist ,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our…

55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Читайте эту статью на русском. A round 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish,…

T he neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross. In late 2011, the Red Cross…

Two decades before Neil Patrick Harris dared to don a golden pair of go-go boots to portray the “internationally ignored song stylist” know as Hedwig Schmidt, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask were perfecting the act on the New York City drag scene. In the wake of Hedwig and the Angry Inch ‘s…

The video was obviously horrible: Fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma, jubilantly and drunkenly singing—to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”—“There will never be a nigger in SAE.” The song went on. “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign…

Sound is not permanent, and much of the recorded recent history of humanity is currently disintegrating. Robert Barry reports from the British Library Sound Archive and Internet Archive to find out what's being done to preserve these audio records, and explains what you can do to help We may not…

Warner Bros/Everett Collection Yes, indeed, The Godfather is masterful. The Sopranos ? We never missed an episode. But you want to talk about a movie that leaves a mark? Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas , the good people behind it—Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro!—re-create the making of the…

Francis Ford Coppola, at right, directs Marlon Brando and the cast in the wedding scene at the start of The Godfather. By Steve Schapiro. During the 1960s, a dirty, loaded word came into currency: Mafia. It signified one of the most terrifying forces on earth, the Italian-American faction of…

“They were old enough to know better, but too young to care. And now this town is... Over the Edge.” —From the theatrical trailer Richie (Matt Dillon) and Carl (Michael Kramer) being arrested by Sergeant Doberman (Harry Northup). In the spring of 1979, a small-budget movie with a somewhat…

GLORY-BOUND Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Travolta in 1994, shortly after Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with…