On April 18, 1948, the New York Times ran a short article about Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett under the headline “ The Happy Union Of Brackett And Wilder .” Part of a series of Hollywood profiles by Phil Koury, it paints a glowing portrait of one of the most successful filmmaking teams in cinema…

“Now go on home, all of you! The circus is over.” —Kirk Douglas, Ace In The Hole In Cameron Crowe’s excellent Hitchcock/Truffaut -style book Conversations With Wilder , Billy Wilder, still sharp and cantankerous in his early 90s, generally remembers his hits fondly and his flops bitterly. As caustic…

Grantland: Nathan Fielder's Awkward Moment: The brilliant and unnerving style of the star of 'Nathan For You,' by @sternlunch http://t.co/BMGk4v0Njx

Jack White sold 40,000 vinyl copies of his new album, Lazaretto – the biggest one-week hard-copy record sales since ... forever . Photograph: PictureGroup / Rex Features I freaking loathe Jack White on a deeply visceral level. I feel like he's an arrogant, appropriating prick and no matter how…

“Isn’t this fun?” That’s how model Anna del Gaizo paraphrased Terry Richardson’s assistant Leslie Lessin’s words as Richardson suddenly attempted to stick his dick in del Gaizo’s mouth while Lessin photographed it happening at Richardson’s studio. Del Gaizo wrote about her 2008 encounter with Terry…

david carr: Vice Has Many Media Giants Salivating, but Its Terms Will Be Rich http://t.co/V615dJeM5l @jonathanmahler and @ravisomaiya report

Clive Thompson: "Fake friends with real benefits": The genuine upside of paying $5 for 4,000 followers, by @gilgul -- https://t.co/ey68Uv3OgQ via @iriscyclo

Clive Thompson: "Real Reading, Fake Reading": @page88 dives wittily into the debate over the speed-reading app Spritz -- https://t.co/05aYLF3NjX

Appeared In Special Issue Menswear issue 06/02/2014 Roger Angell goes to work almost every day at The New Yorker, where he has been a writer and editor since 1956. Earlier this year, an essay he wrote for the magazine—a meditation on the gains and losses that come with age, titled “This Old…

When a black man sends a garbage can crashing through his white employer’s plate-glass window during the galvanizing climax of Do the Right Thing, all howling hell breaks loose. And maybe not just onscreen. Producer-writer-director-actor Spike Lee thinks that his movie, which culminates in a race…

I t was the summer of 1909. I was on the south coast of Spain. I remember it well because the season was almost over. Peace was within reach, I felt. There had been a vote to end the war, and the English had told me to support it. But the vote needed to be unanimous to pass, and it failed. The…

The United States capital really never had a chance. On July 16, 1790, President George Washington signed the Residence Act , which created a special district to serve as the seat of government for the former colonies of England. Creating a city with the explicit purpose of bottling up all of the…

When people are convicted of crimes, we know that they are sentenced to time in jail or prison, to perform community service, and sometimes to undertake drug or alcohol treatment. But they are also routinely sentenced to legal debt. Beyond just fines or restitution, defendants in some jurisdictions…

After the publication of 1978’s The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time , 393 readers tore out a suggestion page provided in the back of the book and mailed it to authors Harry and Michael Medved to inform them of an egregious oversight: Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space . “People really took us to task…

Shenmue debuted on the Dreamcast in 1999. Its sequel, the aptly titled Shenmue II , dropped in 2001. Like most videogames, their narratives ain’t Shakespeare. The first game focuses on Ryo Hazuki avenging his father’s death and investigating a bizarre mirror. Spoiler alert: Shenmue II has Ryo…

Grantland: Dave Chappelle's Block Party, 10 Years Later, by @rembert http://t.co/PXugx5PKCZ

Camera Traders: I know you all use your cell phone cameras, so here's a look at the manual controls (and API) in Apple's iOS8: http://t.co/p9IteEJd7Y

Grantland: Tracking back in Rio, through history, and calculating the cost of the World Cup, by @runofplay http://t.co/3uqJ6U21Un

Image: the actual record/Kickstarter/James E. Thomas It was never easy to "lose" an album, not really. Rock lore is nonetheless full of tales of artists trying to "trash the tapes" of this or that recording, and those artists, from Brian Wilson to Brian Eno, might've buried those records for a good…

Davey D: In Landmark Decision, U.S. Patent Office Cancels Trademark For Redskins Football Team http://t.co/CASwRu19g5 via @thinkprogress

Grantland: Is the Slow-Selling On the Run Tour a Sign of Accelerating Jay and Bey Fatigue?, by @mollylambert http://t.co/D5vq9xjvV4

I n the penultimate episode of Louie ’s fourth season, Louie and Pamela finally went on a date. Their destination was suitably odd: It was a gallery, overflowing with abstract absurdity. There was an all-black canvas titled Jews , and a ceiling draped with glowing neon nooses. A plasticky figure…

T he mayor of Brainerd didn’t like Fargo . “It’s a movie that people who don’t live here seem to enjoy, but for us it’s a little bit of an embarrassment,” Bonnie Cumberland told the Star Tribune in the blizzard-shot winter of 1997. This was in the run-up to the Academy Awards, and Hollywood was…

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2 considerably expands the world introduced in the first film, and that expansion includes a significant new presence: Valka, the long-lost mother of dragon-riding protagonist Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. The film devotes much of its sweet, sensitive middle…

Sex in Japan has made a splash in the media recently, this time via the explosion of Ashley Madison , the world's largest "affair dating" website. Ashley Madison's success in Japan has pulled back the curtain on the widespread adultery in the country, where the approach to marriage seems to…

Image: Shutterstock/ Julia Zakharova Bitcoin is no longer decentralised and the cryptocurrency needs fixing if it’s to survive. That’s the warning some cryptocurrency researchers are giving since a single entity, a Bitcoin mining pool called GHash, managed to acquire 51 percent of total network…

For those of us who have spent the past decade or two on the front lines of trying to make newspapers and other legacy news organizations more digital, the internal innovation report that leaked from The New York Times newsroom last week is fascinating – and more than a little depressing. Viewed…

Shapes fall from the sky, all you have to do is to control how they fall and fit within each other. A simple premise, but add an annoyingly addictive electronica soundtrack (based on a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki , apparently) and you have a revolution in entertainment. Since Tetris was…

"Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?" wonders New York Magazine. Phrasing the proposition in that way — as an either-or binary — is not only insultingly reductive, it's also wildly misleading: as though it's possible that the end product justifies the sexual coercion that created it, or…

Photo: Cass Bird/New York Magazine Terry Richardson, displaced from his old photography studio on the Bowery by a high-end fitness chain, was at his new space, an unadorned floor-through loft down the street. Wood floor, tin ceiling, brick walls interrupted by white swaths of Sheetrock. Four…

Image: screengrab of Logic Pro I play the violin. It's really fucking hard and if I'm even in a less-than-optimal mood, the thing just knows, releasing sounds as if it's being smeared strings-first against a brick wall. So, I get it. I get how programming MIDI instruments to replicate an orchestra…

Getting a College Degree, With Help From Starbucks Monica Almeida/The New York Times Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and…

Photo Credit Lucy Nicholson/Reuters Who is the male feminist? Perhaps we should first ask: Does he even exist? The singer-songwriter and record producer Pharrell, of “Blurred Lines” infamy, thinks not. “I’ve been asked, am I a feminist?” he told an interviewer for Britain’s Channel 4 News. “I don’t…

The Betteridge law of headlines states that "any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no, " but a Monday piece in the New York Times may be the rare exception. "Is it possible to be a male feminist?" asks writer (and self-described male feminist) Jake Flanagin. The…

Jordan Kerner The cast and crew of ‘D3: The Mighty Ducks’ with Anaheim Mighty Ducks star Paul Kariya Like the fictional team, The Mighty Ducks film franchise was always an underdog, one that forced its way to three movies and a fiercely devoted following through dedication, passion and, as often as…

On the eve of Book Expo America (BEA) and BookCon, publishing industry expatriates Jennifer Pan and Sarah McCarry conducted an extended written conversation on why they chose to leave publishing. Sarah McCarry is the author of the novels All Our Pretty Songs and Dirty Wings , and the editor and…

Getting ready for a run: Tying shoes can also get tricky. (Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/Getty Images) I could tell you about toasting a bagel, opening a new box of cereal, or changing the trash bag, but you get the idea. A morning routine that used to take 30 minutes now lasts more than…