BUZZSAWS were buzzing, hammers were hammering, and a sea of empty display racks awaited their wares one morning this week in a cavernous storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a typical scene of retail construction in every way except for what was coming: a record store. When it opens on…

After attaining a certain level of ubiquity, the pop-culture monsters that capture our imagination cease to be the exclusive property of their creators and become a form of folklore, changing with each retelling. Such is the case with troubled motel proprietor Norman Bates. Bates once existed solely…

Join Club PA Penny Arcade Acquisitions Inc. PAX Child's Play Pinny Arcade Sign In With Patreon Join Club PA Club PA Ad Free Experience Club PA Pinny Arcade Pin Staff PA Podcast And 10+ more benefits Learn More Penny Arcade Comics Read Penny Arcade Read The Trenches Read Camp Weedonwantcha Read PA…

The four bare hooks on the Louvre wall that once held the Mona Lisa. From the Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works. Excerpted from The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection , by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, to be published this month by Little, Brown and Company; © 2009…

Can you spot the original? One of many copies of da Vinci's Mona Lisa is housed at Madrid's Prado Museum. The original appears on the left. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Muller-Javier Sorian/AFP/Getty Images W ith the recent discovery in Munich of €1bn (£860m) worth of art looted by the Nazis , and the…

I'm a Christian. I'm proud of my faith, and I love the church. But sometimes my fellow Christians make me want to scream. Like a couple days ago, when a restaurant server posted the following photo to reddit. The story: The pastor was part of a large party who ate at this server's restaurant. Like…

Published in the December 2013 issue Google Glass mayor may not transform the future. But one thing is beyond question: It elicits mighty strong reactions in the present. The first week I got my tiny new face computer, I wore it to a barbecue and sat down at a table to eat pasta salad. "That is the…

Oil, coal and gas companies are contributing to most carbon emissions, causing climate change and some are also funding denial campaigns. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds…

scharpling: I loved Michael Cera's piece for the NEW YORKER. Really funny! http://t.co/VxkkVOfnmy

NaomiAKlein: Rob Ford is secretly the pride of Canada: http://t.co/SKKXrWf74g

Graphic by Slate . Illustration by Martin Handford, published by Candlewick Press. I llustrator Martin Handford published the first in his beloved series of Where’s Waldo books over 25 years ago.* The books challenge readers to find the titular cartoon man, clad in his trusty red-striped shirt and…

Bruce Willis winces, Jason Statham mouths off, Arnold Schwarzenegger quips and gets irritated, Jackie Chan mugs earnestly, Steven Seagal swings his ego like a big distended gut—but only Jean-Claude Van Damme gets frustrated, looks scared, cries, stares off into the distance, shrugs, sighs, yelps in…

The entrance to the Philadelphia Museum Of Art sits atop 72 of the most famous stone steps in the world. They were immortalized by director John G. Avildsen and writer-star Sylvester Stallone in the 1976 movie Rocky . In the film’s signature scene, Stallone’s eponymous hero, a club fighter preparing…

S ome questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts. Seven years ago, The Atlantic surveyed a group of eminent historians to create a ranked list of the 100 people who had done the most to shape the…

ON ITS 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY, 10 JAY Z COLLABORATORS LOOK BACK ON MAKING HIS "LAST" ALBUM The Black Album was something larger than music; it was a cultural event. In seven years, Jay Z had transitioned from full-time hustler to a hip-hop mogul and one of the world’s most powerful pop culture…

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s history with rap music goes deeper than Jay Z’s punch lines and bragging rights. That engagement was most visible in the “Beat Bop” 12-inch, a ten-minute sparring match between MCs/graffiti artists K-Rob and Rammellzee, which the legendary Brooklyn artist produced in 1983.…

Last Tuesday, Google decided that I was a spammer, and I lost access to my e-mail for twelve hours. It was my fault. One of my Twitter accounts, RealHumanPraise, was mentioned on “The Colbert Report ,” where I work as a writer, at 11:46 P.M . In the course of the next hundred and twenty seconds, it…

The QWERTY champion "For years, I've been the QWERTY champion within Sprint," Kaufman began. "Sprint's had one of the largest bases of QWERTY going back to the whole messaging phenomenon ... at one point we were selling 40-percent messaging phones," he explained right off the bat. When Android came…

Bob Barker speaks to the studio audience during his last taping of The Price is Right , on June 6, 2007, in Los Angeles. Photo by Mark Davis/Getty Images O n a crisp November day eight years ago, I took the only sick day of my four years of high school. I was laid up with an awful fever, and annoyed…

What the McRib says about us as a society is worse than any conspiracy theory by Willy Staley One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions,…

Vickie, Alice, Lisa, Debbie, Barbara, Chris, Clair and Cootz boarded the Los Angeles -bound Sunset Limited in Schriever, La., and immediately took residence in the glass-sheathed Sightseer Lounge car. The eight women squeezed into two booths on either side of the aisle and began to scream with…

Published: June 2013 The New Age of Exploration Maxed Out on Everest How to fix the mess at the top of the world By Mark Jenkins Photograph by Subin Thakuri, Utmost Adventure Trekking An hour above high camp on the Southeast Ridge of Everest, Panuru Sherpa and I passed the first body. The dead…

A screenshot from the confession tape of Raymond Santana of the Central Park Five. [This story is part of a series focusing on false confessions and filming interrogations. Read other stories in the series here .] NEW YORK--A 14-year-old Raymond Santana sat slumped in a chair, his arms crossed.…

David Alan Mamet grew up in a Jewish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. His father was a labor lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher; both sides of the family came to Chicago in the 1920s, part of the city’s last wave of central European immigrants. Mamet…

“Stayin’ Alive” Disco should’ve been dead. By late 1977, when the movie Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack were released, many of the biggest hit disco singles had come and gone: “Rock The Boat,” “Kung Fu Fighting,” “Lady Marmalade,” “The Hustle,” “Get Down Tonight,” “Love Machine,” “Disco…

The album is dying in front of our very eyes. In other words, what kind of screwed up world do we live in where Katy Perry ’s new album “Prism” sells only 287,000 copies in its debut? One in which everybody’s interested in the single, and no one’s got time to sit and hear your hour-plus statement.…

Illustration by Jeffrey Decoster My favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade off roles: one of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, “I’ve been searching these pyramids for so many years.…

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Everything stops for the shrill beeping. The sound of basketballs bouncing grows fainter until the gym is silent. One hundred and three campers calmly look to their counselors for instruction. Matt Murphy is less calm, running out of the gym to find the source of the fire alarm…

The Atlanta Braves are relocating. As first reported by the Marietta Daily Journal , the Braves are leaving Turner Field, the downtown home of the Atlanta Braves since 1997. The team is leaving for a new stadium in Cobb County, an inner northside suburb, for the start of the 2017 MLB season. Prior…

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern , one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000…

It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, partly because I needed to move past it and partly because I had forgotten the process of getting it built. I would not discuss the controversy surrounding its construction and it wasn’t until I saw the…

At Some Came Running, in a post titled “ Katherine Heigl is not going to let you see her breasts, ever ,” Glenn Kenny writes about the presence and absence of nudity in Hollywood movies: The question of who gets naked in Hollywood product—not to mention the how and the why—has as much to do with…

In “ Blue Is the Warmest Color ,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, our brightly burning heroines first meet in a lesbian bar in Lille. Adèle, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, has already spotted Emma, a blue-haired sparkplug, on the street, and pleasured herself to thoughts of her.…

The controversies aroused by Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” show just how hung up on sex Americans are, left and right—and why, to a certain extent, they’re right to be hung up on sex, even while drawing the wrong conclusions. The movie has proven controversial in a…

Say you want someone, you know, eliminated —a lover, a business partner, a mother-in-law. There are guys out there who will do that. For a price. Then there's another kind of guy. A guy who looks and acts just like a regular hit man. Prison tats, do-rag. But instead of doing the job, he turns sides…

This is a guest post by Jon Wheatley of Need/Want that originally appeared on the company’s blog . Need/Want makes innovative products that solve problems like SmartBedding and Draft Notebooks . In 2012 I bought an apartment specifically to rent out on Airbnb . I’ve been managing it remotely for the…