Ester Dean, center, has written smash hooks for Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. Illustration by Michael Gillette On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January, Ester Dean, a songwriter and vocalist, arrived at Roc the Mic Studios, on West Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan, for the first of five days of…

The first time he arrived in the United States, three-year-old Juan Cerda ’15 was on a truck tire floating across the Rio Grande river. Cerda’s parents had decided that wading through the waters would be easier than crossing the desert. From there, they trekked to El Paso and then took a plane to…

"So you wanna work for Nintendo?" - A guide to Nintendo's recruitment system 2013-09-16       Even amidst tough competition from iPhone , Playstation4, and XBOX One, Nintendo remains a big player in the video game market. Many kids dream about entering Nintendo, so naturally the competition to work…

Alfonso Cuarón, photographed by Platon Photo: Platon Against a black screen, these words appear first. “At 600 km above planet Earth, the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing to carry sound. No air pressure. No oxygen. Life in space is impossible.” The…

snapchat stock 1020 Technological menace and "hookup culture" are both cultural catnip, so something like Vanity Fair ’s " Friends Without Benefits " is a choice coup for an author like Nancy Jo Sales, who also wrote Bling Ring . "Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder,…

Dear Niko, Last week, the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto series was released. It made a billion dollars — the GDP of Mongolia — in 72 hours. I’d love to know how that makes you, the protagonist of the last full Grand Theft Auto game, feel. Threatened? Possibly a little relieved? To be…

During his first three seasons on Saturday Night Live , Adam Sandler’s best and funniest characters included a mushmouthed man-child in a straw hat, a hanky-waving divo who sang the news, and a moron of indeterminate age oblivious to the advances of a lecherous scoutmaster. His comedy was as…

From Assault on Wall Street (2013), directed by Uwe Boll It’s director Uwe Boll’s incompetence that permits his films to make a radical critique of contemporary violence If someone had told me in 2010 that the most conspicuous U.S. social movement in 40 years would be sparked by Adbusters magazine,…

This is a postscript to a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. During the writing of the series, I received a lot of great comments and…

Former BlackBerry co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, and current CEO Thorsten Heins in a photo collage. Globe and Mail photo illustration This investigative report reveals that: Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.”…

Jeremy Roenick in NHL ’94 was a beast. “A big guy, relatively fast, an accurate shot, great checking ability,” says Michael Brook, the game’s producer. This is true to life. Brook hired a professional scout to rate every individual player for the 1994 season and then fed those ratings into the game.…

“Felina” brought Breaking Bad to a close in the most perfect way imaginable. It squared each circle. It righted all the wrongs. Everything that had been done was undone. The pieces fit together. The keys were in the car. The car was in the compound. The gun was in the trunk. The cat was in the bag.…

Nina Davuluri made history Sunday night when she became the first Indian-American to be crowned Miss America. Much of the media coverage since has focused on the entirely predictable racist comments tweeted after she won ("OMG Miss America is a terrorist!" -- wow, I didn't see that one coming). Of…

Mark Pernice and Zhang Qingyun AFTER resisting for years, I finally gave in and began wearing glasses, mostly when I watch movies or drive (the rest of the time I go around in a tolerable fog). More upsetting than this small sign of physical decay was the acquaintance who took note of my newly…

This is part 6 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

This is part 5 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

This is part 4 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

This is part 3 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

This is part 2 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

This is the first of a multi-part series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that…

Parking lots and plots of bare earth line much of Beale Street, on the south side of downtown Memphis. The landscape is a familiar one. Hollowed out by population flight and urban renewal, it recalls parts of downtown Jackson, Cleveland or Tulsa. Cross South Fourth Street, though, and it’s as if…

Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to…

Is Grand Theft Auto V the most relevant story about torture since Zero Dark Thirty? Tom Chick , September 21, 2013 | Features The following article is about a mission in Grand Theft Auto V called “By the Book”. It contains spoilers about the game up to that point, but not beyond. The root is still…

Words by Daniel Isenberg ( @StanIpcus ) Pianist and composer Bob James may very well be the most sampled jazz musician in the history of hip-hop. Pieces of his now famous compositions like “Nautilus” and “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” have been endlessly loaded into MPCs, SP-1200s, and various other…

DJ Natrobe learns how to spin. (Dan Tham/Forbes) When heiress and reality star Paris Hilton made her DJing debut at a music festival in São Paulo in June, many observers wondered – just how difficult is it to DJ, really? Not at all, according to outspoken dance music producer Deadmau5, real name…

Sep 5 The End Of DJing The End Of DJing… First off, if you’re reading this on your cell phone and you’re in the middle of a dance floor at a club, say good night to your friends, pay your tab, walk outside and step in front of a bus. The world thanks you. I’ve been meaning to write this article for…

It was high noon. The Tower's 3.5-ton bell chimed out 16 poms , right on cue. By then, the temperature was well into the triple digits. The sun beamed down on locals and university students, faculty, and staff alike, all going about their business and lives. August 1, 1966, was just another Monday…

Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion, or the journey will be followed by ill will and malice. So here I am on a Friday in June, looking up at a giant ship that will carry me from Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the Pillars of…

Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas MOTIVATED MOM: In her time seeking children on the Internet, Nicole Eason has referred to herself as Big Momma and Momma Bear. Her term for informal custody transfers is "non-legalized adoption," and she defines the phrase to mean:…

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Just about any teenager in Chicago today can tell you the story of Chief Keef and Lil JoJo, two rappers from the South Side neighborhood of Englewood whose songs serve as anthems for their rival gangs. Keef, an 18-year-old whose real name is Keith Cozart, is the most successful of the city’s…

In grey, the interactions of a social network, and in color, that network mapped through emotions (color coding is same as the figure below). Via Rui Fan et. al Ever notice that whenever some clown writes a truly abhorrent, asinine blog post, it ends up being the most-shared article in your Twitter…

Koch, the conservative industrialist, has given $23 million to public television. Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue:…

Rendering of the Tower, via ASU Last year, one of the world's best science fiction writers teamed up with a respected engineer to build a twelve-and-a-half mile-high tower. For the record, that's 24 times higher than the planet's current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. It's way taller than…

If it's been a big year for Indian Americans, it’s been a really big 25 years. Yet one man has stayed the same for nearly a quarter-century: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Here in the real world, Miss America speaks Telugu , and Mindy Kaling is poised to be the next Tina Fey. As of 2012, Asian Americans…

“One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period.” —Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible In 1971, as part of preproduction on The Godfather ,…

2h AV 'Doom Eternal' doubles the (destructible) demons And that might be just fine. By T. Seppala , 2h ago Save 2h 2h ago in AV ‘Quake Champions’ is free-to-play forever No more waiting until the game fully comes out -- it's F2P now and always. By D. Lumb , 2h ago Save View 3h 3h ago in Gadgetry…