This post was originally published on Priceonomics.com . Yeah, they say three years' salary. Michael Scott, The Office American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage -- they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will…

This morning, Maria Alekhina and Nadezdha Tolokonnikova, two member of the protest group Pussy Riot, were sitting in a McDonalds in Sochi when "around fifty" plainclothes police officers arrested them "for robbery," according to their Twitter feeds . They were out of prison for a little less than…

was sneaking Prince songs onto my Walkman as I practiced drums in the basement, pretending that I was listening to something less scandalous. The cassette reels spun around; that was a revolution. When I was 25, it was walking back to the van after opening for the Pharcyde but getting drawn back to…

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of…

This is a long article, meant to be read at your leisure. You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. Bob Dylan Technology changes tend to be of two types: incremental improvements or disruptive innovations. Incremental improvements allow one manufacturer…

A little more than 25 years ago, Orion Pictures released RoboCop , a grimly hysterical, hyper-violent satire masquerading as an action film. And despite spawning two sequels, a television series, some anime, and now a remake, the film's success was inimitable. This is partly because RoboCop only…

History If you went on one of Diamond’s tours , which ran between 1982 and 2010, you could see why the FDNY was concerned. He’d lug three plastic orange barricades out to the middle of Atlantic Avenue, pry off the manhole cover with a crowbar, and steady a thin ladder into the narrow shaft, the only…

I t’s the day before a foul tip off the bat of Rajai Davis will fracture Francisco Cervelli’s hand, and the Yankees’ still-intact starting catcher is in excellent spirits. After spending almost all of 2012 in the minors, he’s happy to be back in the Yankees clubhouse. He’s also happy to be off to a…

"People prefer imperfect things," the creator of the incredibly popular, loved, hated and now-notorious Flappy Bird , Dong Nguyen, mused over Twitter last March, long before most anyone had ever heard of him or played his game. He was stating why he thought he'd be okay launching a video game that…

Illustration by SHOUT In 2008, air courier DHL left Wilmington, Ohio, sending the small city into a tailspin and transforming it overnight into a poster child of the Great Recession. But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: The citizens refused to let their lovely town wither…

But why that McDonald’s? The kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute dining limit. The news made headlines as far…

The Battle of B-R5RB was the largest and bloodiest in the history of warfare. More than 20 million soldiers were killed and more than 600 warships—some of them kilometers long and capable of destroying lesser vessels with a single shot—destroyed in a battle that raged for 22 hours. At issue was a…

In the new Spike Jonze film, Her , a man falls in love with his operating system. In some ways it’s a commentary on modern society and our increasingly intimate relationship to technology; it's about the smartphones we bring to bed and the computers we wear to work. But there is also a lot of truth…

After Thursday, Jay Leno will no longer be the host of The Tonight Show . You’re likely already aware of this, though you probably don’t care either way. Even if you regularly watch The Tonight Show , or appreciate Leno as a teller of topical jokes, his departure might not feel like a particularly…

Grantland: Arthur Chu, the Richard Hatch of ‘Jeopardy!’: What’s not to love? by @PhloxLombardi http://t.co/By1VwBiL4C

Money on the Game Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times Vegas Runner strode into the sports book of the Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, a fat diamond stud glittering in his left earlobe. Moving through the cavernous room as though it belonged to him, he reached a bar table where his friend R. J.…

Philip Seymour Hoffman: 'The troubling message behind his death, which we all feel without articulating, is that it was unnecessary and we know something could be done.' Photograph: Jamie Simonds/Bafta/Rex P hilip Seymour Hoffman's death was not on the bill. If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus…

Derrick Hamilton speaks with Breathitt County resident Mary Blair during her appointment Jan. 21 at the Breathitt County Family Health Center in Jackson, Ky. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post) in Breathitt County, Ky. — The envelopes began arriving in December across eastern Kentucky, one of…

6 Elements of Arthur Chu's Jeopardy! Strategy January 31, 2014 Jeopardy! / Photographed By Chris Higgins on His Couch Arthur Chu has made waves the last three nights by employing excellent strategy on Jeopardy! He won first on Tuesday , tied to win on Wednesday , and won decisively on Thursday.…

I had yet to eat my breakfast this morning when someone regaled me with a story about a guy staying up in Sochi’s mountaintop media hotel cluster who turned on his faucet and watched as sewage spilled out. Last night, a colleague returned to her room after a long day of work to find the door swung…

I had two contradictory but complementary responses to the news that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died of a drug overdose at the suddenly tender age of 46 — two responses, that is, beyond how terrible and damn, he was great . The first was that there was no way Hoffman had died with a syringe still in…

Hoffman’s 2000 Sean Fennessey: I can only see Philip Seymour Hoffman through the prism of my own experience. Under normal circumstances, I find this shallow and navel-gazing, the kind of thing that has turned obituculture into its own sick cottage industry. But Hoffman, being the kind of character…

Along with everyone else who cares about film and film acting, the writers at The Dissolve were shocked and saddened to hear of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death at the age of 46. News editor Matt Singer wrote an obituary yesterday, but each of us wanted to offer our own reflections on Hoffman’s…

Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in New York on Sunday morning of an apparent drug overdose. He was 46. Hoffman went to rehab for the first time in his early twenties — “I got panicked for my life,” he told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes in 2006 — and was more than two decades clean before he…

Earlier this year, Adrian Younge produced and orchestrated a full-length concept album for Ghostface Killah . It was yet another come-up for the LA-based musician; he’d already established a steady career as a throwback soul artist releasing music on the Wax Poetics label as well as scoring the…

carr2n: The strange hole in the story of Dr. V, the inventor of a magical putter w/a hole in it. http://t.co/qcWzRu11tP @calebhannan sinks a long 1

Calvin: We have houses, electricity, plumbing, heat ... maybe we're so sheltered and comfortable that we've lost touch with the natural world and forgotten our place in it. Maybe we've lost our awe of nature. That's why I want to ask you, as a tiger, a wild animal close to nature, what you think…

Grantland: The eroding legacy of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, by @Rembert http://t.co/GaCQz0qW67

As Vlambeer, the studio I work at, has gotten bigger and our community has grown beyond our biggest fans, I've noticed a shift in the way people interact with us. Where we used to mostly get messages of support and understanding, the ratio of messages that treat us like two guys making video games…

david carr: The secret to having a successful paywall around your news is simple — it’s about community http://t.co/sjfEmUlrcP @mathewi looks in

drew millard: i wrote this thing on what it's like to play music on a cruise ship, please enjoy my this web content http://t.co/QYqZA1wZAQ

Amidst all the well-deserved accolades celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original Macintosh , what has struck me is how very Apple that product — and the team that made it — was. For one thing, they sweated the details. The greatest testimony to their genius is just how much of that original…

Part Six: Apes, Apes, Apes When Beneath The Planet Of The Apes ended with a nuclear bomb blowing up Earth, that was supposed to be the end, which might have worked. Though far less satisfying than Planet Of The Apes , Beneath does at least close off any questions left open by its predecessor,…

David Phillip/AP Images THE WOMAN WHO planned the show wasn't on the field to see her months of work go up in flames. Salli Frattini, an executive producer at MTV, which was contracted by the NFL to produce the halftime concert, was supervising from the production truck outside the stadium. She and…

Not long ago, I was talking about daily life in the N.F.L. with Ryan Fitzpatrick, the veteran Tennessee Titans quarterback, who studied economics at Harvard. “It’s such a physical game,” he said. “You see three-hundred-pounders hitting each other, and people think of the physicality. When people see…