Beyond their bond as the co-creators and stars of the IFC series Portlandia , Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein share something else in common: They both started their careers in music, Brownstein as part of Sleater-Kinney, Armisen most notably as drummer for the post-hardcore band Trenchmouth.…

How Listing Sample Sources In Liner Notes Forever Changed Both Rap Music & Music Discovery As A Whole Art by Leinil Francis Yu On August 27th, 1991 Biz Markie released his third LP “I Need A Haircut” containing the song “Alone Again” which sampled the Gilbert O’Sullivan hit “Alone Again (Naturally)”…

MY WISH LIST We're making it easier than ever for you to stock up on Tribeca Film Festival tickets. Our revamped Wish List will save you time and effort in singling out the Festival titles you cannot wait to see. LEARN MORE To take advantage of the Wish List, you must have a My Tribeca account.…

Image: Adam Soften/Flickr The legal spat between AirBnb and New York keeps getting stickier, and hanging in the balance is the nice little side hustle hundreds of New Yorkers have going on to shave a few bucks off their astronomical rents. But—and this is a "but" worth listening to for the sharing…

Image: Xbox It’s one of the most absurd stories in gaming history: back in 1983, Atari reportedly buried millions of unsold copies of the notoriously terrible game ET the Extra-Terrestrial in a landfill. Based on the Spielberg film (it was in fact one of the first games to have been adapted from a…

Back in 2010, there was an amazing Judge Judy segment that featured four people in a dispute over some smashed TVs and a dead cat. You may have seen a clip of it called "Best Judge Judy ending EVER!!!!!" (It's embedded above.) The story was completely made up—invented by four roommates in order to…

I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been…

Aribert Heim on horseback in his SS uniform The Holocaust, as you’ll probably know, produced some of history’s worst human beings. The thing is, though, besides those who made it into your textbooks—the Hitlers, Görings and Himmlers—many escaped unscathed, free to live out the rest of their days…

" If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball ." With trembling knees and sweaty palms, the requisite nerd cowers in a dark corner of his school’s gymnasium. He bobbles back and forth with uncertainty, as if running into invisible walls: nowhere to hide . A herd of ogreish seniors lumbers toward…

Wayne County, Mich., the region where Detroit is located, has been riddled with problems for decades. But when a massive backlog of rape kits was discovered, a few mighty voices decided to work on changing the way sexual assault is viewed and how victims are treated, while also opening every single…

Decision Points by George W. Bush Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman The World According to Dick Cheney a film directed by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney 1. Why didn’t I know about this? —George W. Bush Jim…

Guest Blog Rap journalist Oliver Wang denied that Illmatic was a classic twenty years ago. We all have our regrets. Twenty years later, Nas's masterpiece still stands the test of time by Back in the primordial days of the Internet, even before “WWW” had become a household term, there were message…

Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Getty This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. Read the second one here , the third one here , and the fourth one here . There are three…

Image: Shutterstock/Low Chin Han “I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked.” That is what Defcon, the current administrator of the infamous black market site Silk Road (the 2.0 version), wrote back in February on the site’s…

The Hateful Eigh t: Live Read Director: Quentin Tarantino (210 Minutes including intermission) Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino Performed Live at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel, April 19, 2014 Until this weekend, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was a textbook example of the stages of Hollywood…

Image: Flickr/Jeffrey Smith Resale used to be the natural start and end point of a track’s lifecycle. You’d buy a CD (or a cassette tape, or a record), listen to it to your heart’s content and then, when it just wasn’t cool any more and you fancied supplementing your pocket money a little, you’d…

Peggy Sirota Comedy is subjective, but not with Louis C.K. He's the funniest man alive, and we don't want any of your lip about it The greatest jokes, Louis C.K. tells me, never register as jokes. Not quite. The punch line of a great joke may punctuate it and make people laugh, "but it doesn’t solve…

Game of Thrones is a massive hit for HBO, both in terms of the raw numbers of people watching and the cultural impact the show has had on television in general. It maintains the cable channel’s status as the home of prestige television, as HBO is a place you go when you want to keep up with what…

Laurie Penny: Last year I wrote a piece about being polyamorous and what it means, for the Guardian. People've been reposting. http://t.co/E5eSqEBFMD

The twist comes with Guetta's transformation from the movement's accidental video scribe into Mr. Brainwash, a street artist phenomenon whose 2008 coming-out party in Los Angeles made him an instant — if completely derivative — success, and whose art now sells in the six figures. The camera captures…

The October afternoon before he is to fight the American, Thub Hong-Mo sits cross-legged on the floor of his Bangkok prison cell, watching soap operas on an old Chinese TV set. It is a rare moment of respite for the 30-year-old, who has spent the past two months – seven days a week, six hours a day…

Matt Rourke/AP Police officers guarded the entrance to Franklin Street in Watertown where there was a search for Boston Marathon bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. by Scott Helman and Jenna Russell, to be published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House company, on…

Before the collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, Brad Katsuyama could tell himself that he bore no responsibility for that system. He worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, for a start. RBC might have been the fifth-biggest bank in North America, by some measures, but it was on nobody’s…

Shortly after 7 a.m. on a chilly morning at the Rosh Hanikra military base in northernmost Israel, Lieutenant Colonel Yogev Bar Sheshet was already on his third Diet Coke. He apologized for his jumpiness. “I don’t sleep much anymore,” he said. A thin man with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed…

⋆ Rec Recommend this Post 5 Back when he was World Wrestling Entertainment's lead play-by-play announcer, Jim Ross didn't mind surprises. As Executive VP of Talent Relations, he already knew who would win the scripted matches, but favored being kept in the dark on details such as whether a wrestler…

Future president George H. W. Bush meets Babe Ruth. Since William Howard Taft in 1910, there has been a tradition of the President of the United States throwing out ceremonial first pitches. This has most often been done on Opening Day in Washington or Baltimore, depending on where on the continuum…

French economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 'I am not political.' Photograph: Ed Alcock for the Observer T he École d'économie de Paris (the Paris School of Economics) is actually situated in the most un-Parisian part of the city. It is on the boulevard Jourdan in…

RuPaul rules over RuPaul's Drag Race , a show with a lot of similarities to another Monday night show: WWE Raw . Mathu Anderson/Logo Every Monday night, TV gives itself over to a mass of preening, posturing men, indulging in petty backbiting. Some are decked out in elaborate costumes, most are…

Imagine going into an espresso bar, as I did in Tokyo, ordering a single shot, and being told that it's not on offer. The counter at No. 8 Bear Pond may feature the shiniest, spiffiest, newest La Marzocco, as well as a Rube Goldberg–esque water-filtration system, but the menu, which lists lattes and…

A couple of years ago I found myself in a basement bar in Yoyogi, a central precinct of Tokyo, drinking cold Sapporo beers with big foamy heads while the salarymen next to me raised their glasses to a TV displaying a fuzzy, obviously bootlegged video of an old Bob Dylan concert. The name of the bar,…

D avid Gordon Green’s new movie Joe , in theaters this weekend, is a bleakly funny rural noir about an ex-convict trying very hard to keep his rage in check. Because Joe is played by Nicolas Cage, you can imagine how well that goes. We believe in Joe’s struggle to maintain control because we’re also…

Grantland: .@BillSimmons on the world’s most exclusive club — only 30 rich guys can say they own an NBA franchise http://t.co/g8EoOxp3Vw

The thought of entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work in Nirvana barely even entered Dave Grohl ’s head until shortly after he walked offstage at last year’s ceremony in Los Angeles after inducting Rush and jamming with them on “2112.” “I did a quick interview and someone said, ‘Are…

Clive Thompson: The fascinating, crazy, wild-west ferment of entrepreneurs in Detroit right now: http://t.co/SehzgYgZdj (Great @StacyCowley piece)

Grantland: Whose World: The strange, wistful 20th anniversary of Nas’s ‘Illmatic,’ by @brothernumpsa http://t.co/LSzFzgFBtD

Grantland: Saving Tiger Stadium — Meet the dedicated Detroiters who resurrected a forgotten ballpark http://t.co/OSjbCtZvM9

Davey D: RT @IndustryEars: #6 Ways to Stop Your Child from Being Brainwashed By Mainstream Rap http://t.co/b6tXsJinfg

Now that BioShock: The Collection is here, we thought it might be interesting to revisit the original game's troubled development. Enjoy! 25th January 2007 was a cold day, even by the harsh standards of a Boston winter. That morning, a dozen senior members of BioShock's beleaguered development team…

Clive Thompson: The NASDAQ of sneakers: http://t.co/YFVsS0NFns