When Phoebe Waller-Bridge started writing the second season of “ Fleabag ” she knew she wanted a scene where the principal characters gathered around a dinner table. So inspired by the scenario, the creator-star eventually wrote, in one big creative “whoosh,” an entire episode based on it. “There’s…

Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of Instagram DMs he’d allegedly sent to a woman. One read: “Teamwork make the dream work” with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the…

It was a little over two years ago that I realized the ad-tech industry had gone too far. I was an executive at a global advertising company, watching a demo from a third-party data provider on how they could help with ad targeting. Their representative brazenly demonstrated how he could pull up his…

Sponsored Links You can pinpoint the exact moment when Apple lost the WWDC audience on Monday. John Ternus, the company's VP of hardware engineering, had just revealed that the Pro Display XDR , its new high-end 6K monitor, will cost $4,999. That's pricey, but reasonable considering all of the…

After Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake , the titular character went into retirement—both in the series’ fiction and real life. It would be another eight years before fans would play a Metal Gear game. That game was Metal Gear Solid , and it helped codify the stealth genre forever. Solid Snake’s story is…

Jared Harris and Emily Watson star as a scientists in HBO’s “Chernobyl,” which, in the absence of a Chernobyl narrative, uses fiction and the outlines of a disaster movie to tell its story. Photograph by Liam Daniel / HBO Svetlana Alexievich, the Russian-language Belarusian writer who won the Nobel…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration At long last, the demise of iTunes has come. On Monday, Apple announced that it will phase out the software once and for all. “If there’s one thing we hear over and over, it’s ‘Can iTunes do even more?’” quipped Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering,…

Keanu Reeves is aware of his celebrity status, but doesn’t take advantage of it, and he’s generous but careful with his presence. Photograph by Karwai Tang / Getty Last week, I read a report in the Times about the current conditions on Mt. Everest, where climbers have taken to shoving one another…

Some iPhone users eschew the protective case. Neil Godwin/Future Publishing via Getty Images The first person I ever met who was fiercely anti-smartphone case was my boss at an old startup job. ”This,” he said, pinching his thin iPhone between his thumb and pointer finger, “involved hours of effort.…

It’s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn’t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos’s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs. That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best…

It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience. Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online…

A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis rank the best films made since 2000. The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far. 查看简体中文版 (Read in Chinese) Leer en español (Read in Spanish) We are now approximately one-sixth of the way through the 21st century, and thousands of movies have already been released.…

Paul Rudd as Bobby Newport, the genial but dimwitted politician on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” In season four of NBC’s “ Parks and Recreation ,” Paul Rudd plays a wealthy businessman named Bobby Newport who runs for city council because he’s looking for something “easy” to do. He is asked during a…

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest Yancey Strickler May 20 Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem , author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. When we look out into space, the theory goes, we’re struck by its…

Ariel Skelley / Getty It’s not hard to spot people about to miss a flight. They’re weaving between on-time travelers at a speed somewhere between a power walk and a sprint, or they’re elbow-dancing their way to the front of the TSA line to plead their case for immediate screening. They look…

Aygun Aliyeva / Shutterstock.com / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic / GoogleMaps I’m sure I looked comical as I staggered down a downtown San Francisco street on a recent weekday, arms full of packages—as I dropped one and bent down to pick it up, another fell, and as I tried to rein that one in,…

Source images: NBC Photo Bank via Getty Images | Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon On April 13, 2019, Saturday Night Live made history, airing the show’s first sketch starring a gay porn star. The nominal star of “The Actress” is Oscar winner and four-time host Emma Stone, playing the title character,…

In a quiet neighborhood near Google’s headquarters last month, rusty, oleaginous sewage was seeping from a parked RV onto the otherwise pristine street. Sergeant Wahed Magee, of the Mountain View Police Department, was furious. “You guys need to take care of it, like ASAP,” he said, lecturing the…

The movies that stay with us—other than, apparently, superhero epics bolstered by years of IP exploitation—are the ones in which we can see ourselves. In that way, the high school movie is a bit of a cheat code. We’ve all been there. While there may not have been anyone at our schools who looked…

Justin Fantl As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you…

A Dollar General store in Chicago. Photo by Jim Young/Reuters. It has become an increasingly common story: A dollar store opens up in an economically depressed area with scarce healthy and affordable food options, sometimes with the help of local tax incentives. It advertises hard-to-beat low prices…

The most interesting musician who ever lived actually didn’t. Born in the rural South during the Great Depression, this man rose from humble beginnings to become America’s most popular genre-spanning artist. He recorded hit after hit, battled the pressures of fame, ruined several romantic…

Perhaps the defining feature of the global economy is precisely that it is global. Toys from China, copper from Chile, T-shirts from Bangladesh, wine from New Zealand, coffee from Ethiopia, and tomatoes from Spain. Like it or not, globalisation is a fundamental feature of the modern economy. In the…

The Billy bookcase is perhaps the archetypal Ikea product. It was dreamed up in 1978 by an Ikea designer called Gillis Lundgren who sketched it on the back of a napkin, worried that he would forget it. Now there are 60-odd million in the world, nearly one for every 100 people - not bad for a humble…

Beto O’Rourke lost. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won. Steve Bannon was banished. These are facts, recorded for posterity. They are also, invariably, narrative beats in our history, results of a series of invisible decisions. Understanding these events—how and why they happened—isn’t as easy as looking…

A closed bank in Stockton, California Max Whittaker / Reuters Is Maggie Denang deserving of your money? How about Tomas Vargas Jr.? Denang and Vargas are residents of Stockton, a high-poverty city on the outskirts of the Bay Area’s technology-and-wealth boom. They are also participants in a much…

The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life We tend to think that good marriages and happy families are born of love and care, not spreadsheets. But what if that’s wrong? Ms. Westervelt is a journalist and podcaster. Credit Script & Seal My husband had been trying to sell me on his…

The National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland. A leaked N.S.A. cyberweapon, EternalBlue, has caused billions of dollars in damage worldwide. A recent attack took place in Baltimore, the agency’s own backyard. Credit Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via REX, via Shutterstock For nearly three weeks,…

The Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450m in 2017.Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images Salvator Mundi , the world’s most expensive painting , will not be part of this year’s big Leonardo da Vinci show in Paris because curators at the Louvre do not believe it can be attributed solely to the…

In a quiet corner of my high school’s study room in 2009, I booted up my busted laptop while making sure nobody could peer over my shoulder. I knew it was a risk to do this on a school Wifi connection, but it sure felt safer than doing it at home. All it took was one website and a desktop app. The…

We didn’t see it coming either. As Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser leads us through the streets of San Francisco, looking for a place to show us his top-secret project, we’re convinced we’re about to see a game. A quiet corner of a coffee shop is apparently not private enough, even though we’re…

Jeenah Moon / Reuters Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated . It’s roughly…

Opinion My Year of No Shopping Leer en español 阅读简体中文版 閱讀繁體中文版 Credit Wenjia Tang Nashville — The idea began in February 2009 over lunch with my friend Elissa, someone I like but rarely see. She walked into the restaurant wearing a fitted black coat with a high collar. “Wow,” I said admiringly.…

The existential Brooklyn MC opens up about his physical, philosophical, and musical journey from self-doubting Ukrainian immigrant to self-confident writer, artist, and human. Your Old Droog’s very name is a statement of identity, imbued with humor and hinting at the anachronism found in his work.…

Gene J. Puskar / AP It’s easier than ever to buy things online. It’s so easy that Ryan Cassata sometimes does it in his sleep. Cassata, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter and actor from Los Angeles, recently got a notification from Amazon that a package had been shipped to his apartment, but he didn’t…

Junki / Getty In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The megaretailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance.…

Shutterstock On the eve of my wife’s 30th birthday—a milestone I, too, will soon hit—she posed a troubling question: Are we adults yet? We certainly feel that way: We hold our own jobs, pay our own rent, cover our own bills, drive our own cars. Our credit is in order. But we don’t yet own a house…

It started in Tokyo on Nov. 1, 2018, when 100 employees walked out of Google’s office at 11:10 a.m. local time. Thirteen hours later, the elevators at the company’s New York City headquarters were so packed that workers took the stairs down to the street to protest. Google employees in Austin…

Felicity Huffman leaves a federal courthouse on April 3. Gretchen Ertl / Reuters Normally, a scandal centered on how rich parents used bribes to win their children’s admittance into elite colleges wouldn’t play so heavily in the national news. No one much cared when Donald Trump promised large…

America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals. The demise of a California housing measure shows how progressives abandon progressive values in their own backyards. Opinion Columnist Homeless people sleeping on the pews in a church in San Francisco. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times To…