An installation view of Educational Complex (1995), by Mike Kelley. I once had this girlfriend who was an artist. We used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, “Oh, that’s something I did in art school.” After a while it dawned on me that a…

Everything that surrounds Daniel Benmergui feels and sounds like fiction. The day that I went to see Benmergui in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I was late, so I took a taxi. Some minutes later, when I asked the driver if we were near, he answered me with a question. —Why are you going there at this hour?…

Sloganear: Soderberg always unmuddles well. http://t.co/sWkoZ1atsH

Berlusconi is the nation’s waning Hugh Hefner, reviled and admired for his hedonism—except that he’s supposed to be running the country. Photograph by Alessandra Benedetti / CORBIS In 2008, during his fourth campaign to become Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a…

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixellated trees, the cloud-draped mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach…

Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming. Photographs by Pari Dukovic On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office…

“He went to Stanford.” This phrase has been used in the past few days to describe Richard Sherman, cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks. After making a play that ensured his team would go to the Super Bowl, he gave the choke sign and then exuberantly (and aggressively) conducted postgame interviews…

Written by Rob Kenner (@boomshots) This coming Sunday, January 26, the biggest stars in the music biz and a cavalcade of industry heads will get all dressed up and head to L.A.’s Staples Center for the Grammy Awards, a.k.a. “Music’s Biggest Night.” Established in 1958, and originally named for the…

Legal marijuana in America is now estimated to be a $1.43 billion industry. And it’s expected to grow to $2.34 billion in 2014. If those numbers hold, the 64 percent increase – a steeper trend line than global smartphone sales – would make pot one of the world’s fastest-growing business sectors.…

Photo Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Credit Keith Bedford/Reuters Editor’s note: Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested just under $50 million in Bitcoin-related start-ups. The firm is actively searching for more…

Tasha: When Scott and I threw down on the most recent episode of The Dissolve Podcast over Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street , one of the many topics we glanced across was our different opinions about how messy a film it is—whether all the scenes are really narratively necessary, or some are…

How do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?* You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his…

Larry Laffer, the concupiscent software salesman , is thinner than I remembered. He's still goofy, though, dressed in his trademark permanent-press white leisure suit, black shirt and gold chains. He's still terrible around women, always saying the wrong thing, always in pressing need of Binaca. And…

"I would like to send you a memory." Buried deep within the internet's most notorious comment section lies a treasure trove of personal stories that prove the power of pop music better than any video ever could. Illustration by Adam Setala for BuzzFeed YouTube comment left below " Telstar " by The…

Mathematician Chris McKinlay hacked OKCupid to find the girl of his dreams. Emily Shur Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA's math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morn­ing, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out…

In early 2005, Josh Demmitt arrived at a federal prison camp, in Sheridan, Oregon, to serve a thirty-month sentence for starting a fire outside an animal-testing facility at Brigham Young University. The nineteen-year-old received a warm welcome from his fellow inmates, who greeted him with coffee…

Grantland33: What Hollywood doesn't understand about Tom Clancy, and how it's killing the Jack Ryan franchise http://t.co/9c4A7lMyGZ

Above: The writer's bread, baked at home. Image Credit: Jolie O'Dell I have a great business idea: luxury sanitation. White-glove garbage collectors and high-end toilet systems. San Francisco has overpriced every other basic commodity of human existence. Why not take that trend to its illogical…

Giulietta Carrelli outside the Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club. (Photo: Jeff Singer) All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare—blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line…

Calgary is now a city of million-dollar condos. Where the prairie once spread out, it is now gnarled with traffic. The Rubik’s Cube of traffic, a Calgarian’s favourite topic. Nowadays, Calgary is a place where oilmen fight nightly for tables in wine bars. Thirty years ago there were no wine…

Using Bitcoin has never been more convenient. Via Beyond the hype and wild speculation, Bitcoin is beginning to look like conventional money—that is, people are spending it for the exchange of common goods and services. Observers have long been critical about the cryptocurrency because it hasn’t…

Drawing of a Rikers Island detainee by Ricardo Cortés, who runs art workshops at the New York City detention complex. On Rikers Island it is not fruitful to be angry. For the past year I’ve run art workshops for men and women who live here, in New York City’s largest detention complex. I’ve seen…

Zach Gage says his riff on Space Invaders isn't maliciously designed software made to destroy your computer files — though it might do that. It's a more thoughtful project than that. Lose/Lose is about values and value. It's about what happens if a "Game Over" screen destroys your copy of the game,…

On a warm evening earlier this month outside a cafe in Buenos Aires, Colin Northway took a sip of his drink and told me about the rarest video game in the world. He was making the game, he told me, and he was excited about it. He didn’t call it the rarest game on the planet. That’s just how I would…

Words: David Scott / Shots: Bilal Chawala As rap resumes go sharing a stage with KRS-One at the age of thirteen, tour buddy with Rakim and being close friends with Chuck D is impressive; but if you’re after a character reference then you could do worse than ask US National Security – they’d know…

Much to the chagrin of a certain old-timey subset, traditional American masculinity is on its way out. Gone are days of the breadwinning hard hat wearers earning enough to support a wife that stays at home with 2.5 children; in 2014, the Haves wear bowties with short sleeved button down shirts and…

source: angelonfire The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity When Kobe was developing his jumper he’d spend his offseason making 2,000 shots a day. Not taking. Making. — Chad Ridgeway, Bleacher Report I was recently reminded of a simple general principle to operate by, especially for those of us…

AR-15s were produced and engraved for Redditors by an Arizona gun manufacturer. via Reddit Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. Since 2011, part of the popular online forum Reddit has grown into an active marketplace for assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, and…

As winter storms were buffeting parts of the country last week, our collective attention was drawn halfway around the world to Egypt. Images of the pyramids and the Sphinx covered in snow had emerged, and were being shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter. It wasn't hard to see…

“There wasn’t anything special about it.” That’s producer Mark Johnson on Rain Man , his sixth collaboration with writer-director Barry Levinson. But Johnson wasn’t quite right. Twenty-five years ago, Rain Man — a talky drama about two very different brothers on a road trip — won the Academy Award…

Recent Sundance Standouts Daniel McFadden/Relativity Media On Jan. 16, some 7,000 entertainment industry professionals and journalists will converge on Park City, Utah, hoping for a miracle. Distributors will push past exhibitors who will hustle past programmers, agents and critics, all of whom will…

Words by Daniel Isenberg ( @StanIpcus ) Across the Tappan Zee Bridge and into the suburbs of Rockland County, just minutes from the Palisades Mall and about a half hour or so from his hometown of Mount Vernon, you can still find legendary producer Pete Rock cooking up beats in his basement. His…

Words by Daniel Isenberg ( @StanIpcus ) When the topic of the industry’s best producers on the mic comes up, one name that is often championed by underground heads is Detroit’s Black Milk. And rightfully so. His discography includes stellar production for some of his hometown’s best and brightest,…

Mike Piazza has admitted to the use of androstenedione, a supplement now banned by MLB. (Photo: Paul Chiasson, AP) Story Highlights Some believe the Hall of Fame process in flawed and archaic The results of the 2013 balloting will be announced Wednesday Maddux, Glavine and Thomas elected It has…

Grantland33: We know what MLB players were doing during the steroid era. Here's what baseball writers did, by @curtisbeast http://t.co/0D1NM4ZWRE

(Photo: Pacific Standard) I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. “Amanda, this twitter account.…

Just when you think you've gotten to the end of the bizarre by-products of World War II, you learn about talking Nazi dogs. The question is: How official were they? We'll look into the school — or possibly the con game — of talking dogs. Here's what we know. In 1930, Margarethe Schmidt lived with…

Grantland33: A word about 'NBA 2K14': How realistic do we want our video games to be? by @netw3rk http://t.co/8HK3NHbQH2