Michelle Sinclair (left) with Maya Rudolph and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice An unexpected standout among the star-studded cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice is Michelle Sinclair, who until 2012 performed in adult videos under the name Belladonna. Sinclair plays Clancy Charlock, sister…

Illustration by Christoph Niemann In 2004, when Danny Meyer opened a burger stand named Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, it didn’t look like the foundation of a global empire. There was just one location, and Meyer was known for high-end venues like Gramercy Tavern. But the lines became…

Matt Malone doesn't mind being called a professional dumpster diver. He tells me this a little after 2 am on the morning of July 7 as we cruise the trash receptacles behind the stores of a shopping center just off the Capital of Texas Highway in Austin. Given the image that conjures, though, it's…

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Rick Famuyiwa, Leslye Headland. Photo: Jeff Vespa/Getty Images If you watched the Super Bowl this past weekend, you no doubt caught the ad for one of this year's biggest movies: Jurassic World , the megabudget franchise restart directed by Colin Trevorrow. What film did…

Hannes Sjoblad The newly created cyborgs seem very happy to have been upgraded Darkness had fallen over Stockholm as a group of eight people entered Swahili Bobs, a tattoo parlour in the dark alleys of Sodermalm. By day there were tech entrepreneurs, students, web designers and IT consultants - but…

Arguments over microscopic differences in font size may seem petty, but the dimensions and placement of an artist's name on a music-festival poster is a matter of extreme importance -- and, often, intense negotiation -- to the talent buyers, acts, and agents who represent them. Though not all admit…

Want to gain entry to your office, get on a bus, or perhaps buy a sandwich? We're all getting used to swiping a card to do all these things. But at Epicenter, a new hi-tech office block in Sweden, they are trying a different approach - a chip under the skin. Felicio de Costa, whose company is one of…

With anilingus currently in so many editorial spreads and on the tip of so many tongues, it bears noting that Mozart wrote a song about eating ass. Titled “Leck mich im Arsch,” which literally translates to “ Lick me in the ass ,” it’s the sort of song that might be referred to as a “bawdy ode” or a…

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#BreakTheInternet? On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website (NSFW). It linked together all of…

Preet Bharara goes to war. Carlo Allegri / Reuters Preet Bharara stood out first not for his early prosecutions of bankers and local pols — aggressive, but not unusual for an office with an aggressive tradition — but for his rather edgy sense of humor. It was the summer of 2013, and Preet was the…

After nearly every death, the police announced that the person the officer had shot was violent, a career criminal, or mentally ill. Illustration by Oliver Munday Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a…

A few months before she died, my grandmother made a decision. Bobby, as her friends called her (theirs is a generation of nicknames), was a farmer’s wife who not only survived World War II but also found in it justification for her natural hoarding talent. ‘Waste not, want not’ was a principle she…

When Life is Strange is released on Jan. 30, publisher Square Enix will also make a free playable demo available. It's a taster of the first 20-minutes or so of this Telltale-style episodic adventure. Life is Strange is the story of a high school student who returns to her hometown after a five-year…

Inside the studio where ESPN is betting billions on the future of sports "Oh my goodness," NBC football analyst Cris Collinsworth shouts into his headset mic over the roar of the MetLife Stadium crowd. "This is sick. Put this to music. I don't think he stepped out, either. That may be the greatest…

Note: In yesterday’s Churchill School of Adulthood lesson , we offered examples from Winston’s life as to how he embodied artist Constantin Brancuși ’s maxim that to live a fulfilling, flourishing life, one must “ Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god .” Because the takeaways of…

How one gifted rapper endured triumph and tragedy to discover his own complicated voice By Brian Coleman It’s not a radical thing to say that MF Doom is a pretty damned interesting MC. He is never-endingly engaging, hyper intelligent and his flow has an off-beat power and allure to it that is…

The New York Times: How, and why, Apple overtook Microsoft http://t.co/4hCVa6emq0

The first time I ever wrote anything about games, it was because I was still brokenhearted about a relationship that had dissolved years ago. PC Gamer edited the 4000 word essay into a six pager about Dota in 2012 and it is still one of the best things I have ever written. But wherever I go,…

Dave Catchpole/Flickr Every once in a while, I am asked what I “make.” A hack day might require it, or a conference might ask me to describe “what I make” so it can go on my name tag. I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity,…

Nod’s black-tar heroin had a certain sweetness to it. Many customers fell in love at first taste. After all, they’d been through a lot. Before Nod, many of Silk Road ’s previous heroin vendors were notoriously unreliable. Old dealers on the Deep Web black market—accessible only through the Tor…

A still from “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” a documentary about the singer and civil-rights icon Nina Simone. Courtesy Sundance Institute On the opening night of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics. The first…

With statehood, New York City would take its place on the United States flag as the 51st star. But what would be the consequences? Image © Mike Brown Stuart Sutton, 42, is walking with his son down the streets of Harlem on a hot afternoon. “My son did it all! Pre-K, Head Start, kindergarten. It’s…

When I give a basic definition of my chosen genre, written erotica, I usually say, “writing intended to arouse.” But what does that look like in terms of safer sex? Do erotica and erotic romance writers owe their readers the courtesy of making their characters act responsibly when it comes to birth…

Croatia's new Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic speaks before parliament in Zagreb. (REUTERS/Nikola Solic) Starting Monday, thousands of Croatia's poorest citizens will benefit from an unusual gift: They will have their debts wiped out. Named "fresh start," the government scheme aims to help some of…

An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn't trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. "Meeting in person is out of…

By our third phone call, Steven Lloyd Sadler was a fugitive. Facing federal charges for drug trafficking and distribution, Sadler decided he’d rather skip the trial and jail sentence altogether. He was pulling away from Seattle, where he was charged, and we talked for hours. He began that particular…

About a half-billion dollars worth of it vanished from an online exchange in Tokyo. A prosecutor in Manhattan arrested the 24-year-old vice chairman of its most prominent trading body on drug-related charges of money laundering. Its founder’s identity remains a mystery, and last year, it shed…

If you're a musician who has worked hard on a new record, it must be pretty frustrating when it invariably leaks on BitTorrent. RuPaul just trolled would-be pirates with a fake leak of the album Born Naked . Daft Punk's Random Access Memories Has Leaked Online (Updated) Surprise! The new Daft Punk…

O n the night that Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla strode into the lobby of the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel in Mexico City, the price on his head was $5 million. The handsome 33-year-old, nicknamed El Vicentillo (Pretty Boy Vicente), was a notorious drug capo. He was also the only son of Ismael “El…

For its two and a half years online, thousands of drug dealers sold every kind of narcotic imaginable on the anonymous online marketplace known as the Silk Road. But put one of the site's heroin dealers in a courtroom and ask him questions under oath, and the scale and consequences of that drug…

The inertia of the brilliant Times Square scene in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “ Birdman ” is deceptive. What seems like a roller coaster ride that stops actually picks up again when Michael Keaton re-enters the theater to continue his manic performance. We get the lowdown on the Best Picture…

Scott: I hadn’t seen Rock ’N’ Roll High School for probably 20 years, and it’s even better than I remember—so much so that you’ll have to forgive my reaching for superlatives. My first thought is this: The film is as good and proper a vehicle for the Ramones as A Hard Day’s Night was for The…

Filmmaking increasingly doesn’t involve film at all as the majority of films — both Hollywood blockbusters and small independent films — are shot digitally. It’s worth noting that although digitally-shot films dominate the Sundance lineup, this year a good number of projects were produced on film…

At the foot of the desk of the new baseball commissioner, in a frame waiting to be hung on his office wall, is an original roster from the Rome American Little League in upstate New York, dated April 27, 1969. In the No. 10 slot is a 10-year-old from Van Buren Avenue named Robert Manfred. He never…