The relationship between Rachel Cusk and the English press is like a lousy marriage from one of her own barbed, unsentimental novels. When Cusk first blew onto the scene in the early ’90s with the publication of Saving Agnes , she was a photogenic and brilliant Oxford grad who always sounded a bit…

Century-old American companies like General Electric and Ford appear ancient when viewed alongside modern upstarts like Google and Facebook. But there are a number of Japanese firms—some of which have been around for more than a millennium—that exist on another scale of time entirely. Japan is home…

Björk photographed for her 2015 album, Vulnicura. Photograph: Courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin A few years ago, for a feature on a music blog, I asked Björk to make a selection of her favourite records . Her list included Mahler’s 10th Symphony; Alban Berg’s Lulu ; Steve Reich’s…

Our team here at Buffalo 8 Productions and BondIt will be releasing a five part film financing series over the course of the next few months. Stay tuned for articles on packaging (talent and finance), capital structuring (equity, debt, fundraising), producing within a framework (budgetary production…

Last night’s SNL 40th-anniversary special had the unenviable task of cramming decades of comedy history into one evening’s worth of entertainment. Granted, the program in question stretched into an almost four-hour extravaganza, but even that wasn’t enough time to represent all that Saturday Night…

If you think of SNL 40 as a massive dress rehearsal that inadvertently became the live show, the whole night makes more sense. For one of the few times in his life, Lorne Michaels couldn’t cut anything. How do you cut that clumsy “Californians” sketch and tell Taylor Swift and Bradley Cooper,…

My father, Andrew Jefferson Offutt V, grew up in a log cabin in Taylorsville, Ky. The house had 12-inch-thick walls with gun ports to defend against attackers: first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus…

Editor's note: This story was originally published in ESPN The Magazine's Feb. 16 Gambling Issue. ON A MID-SEPTEMBER night, Ezekiel Rubalcada swaggers through the doors of Las Vegas' M Resort Spa Casino. He moves to the half-moon-shaped bar overlooking the sportsbook, catching up with old friends.…

david carr: “How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It: An Explainer” by @rsingel https://t.co/HD1gn96YYT

Grantland: Solo act: The making of Tom Hardy’s man-alone drama, ‘Locke,’ by @misterpatches http://t.co/wNDRk1ni98

A year ago, I created a viral Twitter account. Here‘s what I learned. The first episode of the dystopian U.K. television series Black Mirror is the least notable because the events in its plotline look the most familiar to us now: when a member of the British royal family is kidnapped in what’s…

I n a recent episode of The Mindy Project , Mindy Lahiri, the show’s protagonist played by South Asian American comedian and actress Mindy Kaling, was considering a medical fellowship at Stanford. Her boyfriend, fellow doctor Danny Castellano, upset by the prospect of her moving to California,…

In early 2010, I wrote a column about Vice in which Shane Smith, one of the founders, suggested that he and his band of insurgents were building “the next MTV.” And then there was a promise to become “the next CNN” — outrageous claims at the time, but they are becoming truer every passing day. I…

"You know what Peter Molyneux's like," an ex-22Cans employee told me while trying to sum up the infamous designer's tendency to make enormous promises and then just kinda... forget about them. "You try to hold onto his words and they slip through your fingers." Molyneux—who has long had a reputation…

In this three-part Tech Behind Bars series, we’re exploring the points of intersection between digital culture and America’s correctional system. Earlier: Inside the prison system’s illicit digital world ; After years behind bars, can prisoners re-enter a digital society? Walking through the second…

As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger…

2012 was a legendarily bad year for deadpan stand-up comedian Tig Notaro. In short order, she endured a life-threatening bacterial infection and the accidental death of her beloved mother, she was dumped, and she learned she had breast cancer. Notaro famously exposed all that and more during an…

People need to be able to play a game before they can begin to digest or critique it. While gaming has made some incredible strides the past few years, it's rare to find one that I genuinely, passionately love that I can also share with my non-gaming friends and family. That basic fact goes a long…

Jan 28, 2015 5:31 pm Share This Article Mark and Jay Duplass are a ubiquitous presence at this year’s Sundance Film Festival . They were involved with three Sundance films, “The Bronze,” “The Overnight,” and “Tangerine” and an animated TV pilot (“Animals”). In addition to dominating Sundance,…

Intensely shy ... Mingering Mike at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photograph: Jocelyn Augustino for the Guardian T his story begins with a record collector unearthing something extraordinary at a flea market one dawn in 2003. His name is Dori Hadar. He worked as a criminal investigator for a…

As many of you know, I'm currently in the midst of importing a Nissan Skyline GT-R to the United States. Some of you have asked why I chose the Skyline GT-R, and so today I must reveal the answer to this question: because I still have thousands of leftover Gran Turismo 2 credits I can use to buy…

I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with…

How YouTubechanged the world In late 2005, when YouTube was just a few months old, one of its co-founders announced that the site’s users were consuming the equivalent of an entire Blockbuster store each month. Today, 300 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. And Blockbuster… Well,…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

I don’t remember the first time I heard “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” I do recall, however, the first time I was instructed to listen to it. The version was Donny Hathaway’s take , from his 1970 album Everything Is Everything . At the time, headed to fifth grade and abruptly leaving the familiar…

Two Dissolve writers keep the Muppet Movie conversation going... Noel: By the time The Muppet Movie came out in 1979, Jim Henson had been in show business for about 25 years—not all of it spent with his hand covered in felt. Beyond puppetry, Henson had tried avant-garde filmmaking , and had…

ABOVE: HANNIBAL BURESS. PHOTO COURTESY OF MARCUS PRICE. Perched behind the steering wheel of a rental car, the 31, soon-to-be 32-year-old New York comedian Hannibal Buress is departing Jersey City, cruising westbound on the I-78 expressway. He is approximately two hours away from his Atlantic City…

Two Dissolvers keep the Back To The Future conversation going... Genevieve: Here we are, nearly 30 full years beyond Back To The Future ’s release, and hardly anything’s changed: Huey Lewis is still a beloved and popular cultural icon, Pepsi Free has usurped all other soda to be named The King Of…

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been frequenting the deep web marketplaces most famously used for buying drugs online with Bitcoin. I wanted to see if there was anything we could learn about how these illicit marketplaces work that could be applied to improve the legal marketplaces we invest in…

He's tackled Enron, Eliot Spitzer and Lance Armstrong. Now, the Oscar winner is taking aim at the controversial church (and its lawyers) as he reveals that a private investigator has been asking questions about him: "This Scientology thing — that just takes a huge set to take them on," says…

The curious case of the disappearing Polish S One keyboard bug three decades in the making A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium: “I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens…

Recently I traveled to Tampa, Florida to meet with senior officers of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in a secure location near their headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. USSOCOM includes the Navy SEALS, DELTA Force, Green Berets, and other highly trained and specialized units…

Download a PDF of this graphic This summer, people will cruise through the streets of Greenwich, UK, in electric shuttles with no one's hands on the steering wheel — or any steering wheel at all. The £8-million (US$12-million) project, part of a larger study of driverless cars funded by the UK…

In this three-part Tech Behind Bars series, we’re exploring the points of intersection between digital culture and America’s correctional system. (See part two here , and part three here .) On January 2, 2014, a vendor truck approached the entrance to the Sierra Conservation Center, a mid-sized…

1. Buy an instant-read digital meat thermometer. The quickest way to ruin a perfectly marbled $25 steak? Cutting into it to figure out if it’s medium rare. Yes, the Thermapen is $95, but four steaks later, you’ve broken even. 2. Write in your cookbooks. Soup could have used more tomato? Chicken…

Problematic, contradictory art is inherently compelling, because it has to be navigated and sorted, and because it tends to produce these x-but-also-y mysteries that can’t be completely solved, but instead just have to be accepted for what they are. As far as problematic art in America is concerned,…

The Backstreet Boys break a lot of boy-band rules. According to a script established decades ago, these acts are supposed to have an extremely limited shelf life. The journey from middle school showcases to sold-out stadiums and back to oblivion is supposed to take, roughly, four or five years.…