By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame—each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder…

Flickr/Steve Schroeder F rom the outside, it is hard to know that people live in the Ramada Inn. The parking lot is always empty. The hotel sits facing a wide suburban boulevard called Kipling Street, just off Interstate 70 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The interchange where Kipling meets the freeway is…

In this month’s Vanity Fair, contributing editor Mark Bowden re-unites with Ken Brennan—the private detective whose intrepid work Bowden first profiled in “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde”—to chronicle the cracking of yet another unsolvable case. VF Daily caught up with Brennan to discuss his…

EARLY CHECKOUT The third-floor hotel room where Greg Fleniken’s body was found—cause of death a mystery. Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Dirty clothes went on…

R epo Man, released in early 1984, was the first feature film by a twenty- nine-year-old British UCLA film school graduate named Alex Cox. Even now, the film’s existence seems implausible. It is an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science fiction story with less than…

The Williamsburg headquarters of Vice Media, which calls itself “the Time Warner of the streets.” Its C.E.O., Shane Smith (on phone, above), says, “The over-all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.” Photograph by Chris Buck Late in February, in the Ryugyong Chung Ju-yung…

Alfred Anaya took pride in his generous service guarantee. Though his stereo installation business, Valley Custom Audio Fanatics, was just a one-man operation based out of his San Fernando, California, home, he offered all of his clients a lifetime warranty: If there was ever any problem with his…

ninety-nine glimpses The Everlasting Appeal of Princess Margaret A new book explains why the Queen’s younger sister has a story worth telling. by Hilary Weaver ninety-nine glimpses The Everlasting Appeal of Princess Margaret A new book explains why the Queen’s younger sister has a story worth…

Flights of fancy: a stuffed tawny and barn owl. Photograph: Alamy D oes there come a day in every man's life when he looks around and says to himself: I've got to weed out some of these owls? I can't be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Therefore you…

TURE LILLEGRAVEN Four years ago, he was just some Swedish kid named Tim who liked messing around on his laptop at home. One iTunes-dominating dance hit ("Levels") later, he's Avicii, world's hottest DJ, making $250,000 a night to keep the Ecstasy-dosed, champagne-soaked masses moving. Jessica…

I n the back room of Manhattan’s Carnegie Deli, Don King picked at a pastrami sandwich with his fingers. He had just been asked a question about his electric hair and, for the first time in a day filled with radio and television interviews, King paused before he spoke. A cautious look crept over his…

Y ou can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures — the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone…

V ideo games are an important medium of human expression, but sometimes it’s nice to remember that they also allow you to stab a Bismarck-helmeted dude in the neck and teleport to a distant windowsill. I fired up Arkane Studios’ Dishonored — one of the stabbiest, most teleporty games in recent…

An envelope waits when I arrive at the Park Hyatt hotel in Milan. It is very precious. A bellman comes to my room to give it to me by hand. Inside is an invitation the size of a billboard in gold embossed letters: GUCCI MONDAY JANUARY 14 AT 12:30 PM FALL WINTER 2013-2014 MEN'S COLLECTION PIAZZA…

Shane Carruth’s first movie, 2004’s complex, no-budget time-travel fantasy Primer, earned him a cult following that still hasn’t finished untangling the film’s chronology. The director’s follow-up, Upstream Color —a love story involving pigs, brain-eating worms, and Henry David Thoreau—should keep…

Photograph by James West. Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. IT’S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my…

Last month, Columbia Journalism Review Books and Columbia University Press released The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry , an anthology of insights and reminiscences from top magazine editors. The book is based on talks given to students as part of the…

L ast winter, I received an interesting invitation. Would I, and my video-game-writing partner, Rob Auten, like to travel to Boston to spend a weekend playing a complete but not yet fully polished build of BioShock Infinite , the spiritual successor to BioShock , which is among the most beloved…

Sony Pictures/Everett Collection Why on earth would someone pay hundreds of dollars to fly halfway across the country for the pleasure of being abducted by thugs, handcuffed in a basement for hours, and forced to pee into a Gatorade bottle? GQ made Drew Magary go find out. (Sorry, Drew) There was a…

You're six years old and flipping through the channels on a Sunday morning. You normally go to church but you stayed home today for whatever reason. When you get to the USA Network, you freeze. Without warning, you're staring at two huge men in face paint, roaring at the camera. They step into a…

Andrew Rowat The Monkey’s Paw owner Stephen Fowler, with an atlas of Korea published in 1967. A tiny shop in Toronto, specializing in the arcane and the absurd, may just be publishing’s great new hope. In the late 1930s, the Women’s Printing Society, in London, published a slim book with a curious…

Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service . For inquiries related to this message please contact support . For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot…

Perhaps the endless runner is the video-game genre for our times. We have to run just to keep up. We don’t know what we’re running toward, or from — we only know we are running. Genre classics like Canabalt and Jetpack Joyride and Punch Quest , with their jumping, jetting, and punching, actually…

Update, April 14, 2016: In 2013, we detailed how Intuit has lobbied against allowing the government to estimate your taxes for you. So this week, we called Intuit and asked if they still oppose free, government-prepared returns. The answer: Yes. “Our legislative, our policy position on that hasn’t…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

This post originally ran in December of 2012. Today, Google Reader, the eight-year-old RSS reader that became an industry standard, has been given a funeral date : July 1st, 2013. "We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite…

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images for CineVegas In Set List , we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two in the process. The artist: As the producer for De La Soul, Prince Paul’s…

After a grueling fifty six hours and thirty minutes, Missile Command, the Cold War-era arcade cabinet concerning the defense of helpless cities from commie nukes, has been conquered. The new world champ (pending verification from Twin Galaxies) is Victor Sandberg, an incredibly sleep-deprived…

Dark humor runs through Portal 2 , the massively successful 2011 offering from Valve Software. The game’s antagonist, GLaDOS (short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), goads the player, pushing and prodding him or her along with an ever-present narcissistic, sarcastic, sinister wit…

In 2008, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan began leading a team of undercover investigators targeting the drug dealers who used Craigslist to advertise their wares. She sounded confident. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel," she told the Daily News . That year, a…

A dress rehearsal at the Bolshoi, a month after the acid attack on the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin. Since the nineteenth century, the Bolshoi has uncannily embodied the society to which it belongs: imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and, now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Photograph by Misha…

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but…