Image Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg The iPod turns 20 this year — holy you-know-what! Apple’s first foray into truly disruptive technology since the PC wars is basically old enough to drink. And it was followed by a string of lucrative successes with the iPhone, the App Store, and Apple…

On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn, Open Mike Eagle (or, more formally, Michael W. Eagle II) has finished sound check for a sold out show at Rough Trade and is strolling the couple of blocks to a nearby bar. Once settled inside the Kent Ale House, the Chicago-raised but now Los Angeles-based art rap…

You may have noticed a recent uptick in references to con artists, scammers, and swindlers in the media. Perhaps you read some of the big stories about mega-grifters that have been published recently, like Jessica Pressler’s piece in New York Magazine about social striver Anna Delvey, or the Rolling…

Critic’s Notebook Credit Illustration by Johanna Goodman I started noticing it a few years ago: Seemingly every young person on the internet was selling something. Not in the way that we’re all selling ourselves now, cultivating our personal brands on social media. They were selling actual stuff.…

Transform your life by gathering for meatballs. [ Photographs: Carina Romano ] Super-Simple Friday Night Meatballs Friday, 7 p.m. I light the candles. For the last two hours, I have been rushing: cleaning up toys and clutter, vacuuming, dusting. Now the table is set with my great-grandmother's good…

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Jarek Ceborski/Unsplash and Jakob Owens/Unsplash. Over the weekend, news outlets reported that a New Zealand man named Andrew Barker had found a camera, hidden in a smoke detector, in his Airbnb that was livestreaming a feed of the living room. Barker was in…

Paramount There’s one question I hear as a personal finance writer more than any other. It’s not how to game the stock market, or become a billionaire—it’s simply how to make a budget work while still saving enough to retire comfortably. And of course, it’s simple: Change your habits so you can put…

Any scam that manages to succeed as a scam, if you squint a little when looking at it, will also look pretty similar to … competence. HBO Late last month—shortly after the special counsel’s office delivered the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election to…

Jennifer Mittelstadt is a history professor at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State . Forty-five years ago, the United States ended conscription and embarked on the experiment of the all-volunteer force, meaning that no military personnel would be forced to…

Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream . How much money do you have saved in your…

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin, a Guardian US columnist, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality . Your ancestors were probably peasants. They worked a little plot of land and on that land grew a…

Chris Nowinski earned a PhD in behavioral neuroscience after concussions suffered as a Harvard football player and professional wrestler ended his athletic career. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation . Football is the most popular sport to watch in America. More than…

Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist. She founded and leads The On Being Project, a media and public life initiative which includes the On Being public radio show/podcast and the Civil Conversations Project. She is the author of Becoming Wise: An…

Meredith Broussard is an assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World . She is an excellent driver. The vision of the “smart city” of the future involves driverless cars.…

Jacob T. Levy is the Tomlinson professor of political theory and director of the Yan P. Lin Center for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders at McGill University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center . He is the author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom . “What will be on the wrong side of…

Lux Alptraum is the author of Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal . In spring 2016, the human rights advocacy organization Amnesty International took a bold step: It officially endorsed sex work decriminalization as the most effective and humane political response…

Roger McNamee has been investing in technology companies since 1982, and has co-founded three successful investment firms. From 2006 to 2009, he was an adviser to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He is the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe . The internet began as a Department…

We spend a lot of energy looking for shortcuts to save time, and sure, those shortcuts add up. But when I look back, my biggest time regrets aren't spending too much time on Twitter or mismanaging my daily tasks. Those are bad habits, but there are bigger, more systematic time wasters that have…

Brian Schaefer (far right) and his husband, Stephen Mack, entertain guests at a dinner at Del Posto in Manhattan. The couple opted to celebrate their marriage with a dozen small gatherings instead of one large reception in what they dubbed a Deconstructed Reception. Credit Amy Lombard for The New…

Photo: Filip Mroz Running may be one of the simplest fitness activities to pick up—you just need a pair of shoes and the open road—but it’s also hard on your body if you’re not used to it. I spoke with Jason Fitzgerald , a running coach (and longtime friend of Lifehacker) who specializes in helping…

In his first major interview since being fired by the company in 2018, MoviePass cofounder Stacy Spikes opened up to Business Insider about creating the startup and what led to his exit. Spikes talked about the game-changing innovations that made MoviePass possible, including creating a geolocation…

Photo: Claudette Barius/© 2019 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. On the evening of Tuesday, March 19, two days before the opening of Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed Get Out follow-up Us , Twitter user @MaxCorn paired up and tweeted out an arresting pair of photographs: Jordan Peele out…

Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994, leaving behind a legacy of work that has continued to inspire intense appreciation and curiosity. Twenty-five years ago, on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27 , a victim of suicide. He left behind the epochal rock music he made as the singer and…

JAN. 26, 1992 About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process…

Jake Orta searched through a trash bin outside Mark Zuckerberg’s home in San Francisco. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.…

Attorney General William P. Barr has shown hints of frustration with how the rollout of the special counsel’s chief findings has unfolded. Credit Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr…

APRIL 8, 2004 The boy looked just like Kurt Cobain. He was no more than 19. Same yellow hanging hair, fallow blue eyes, the sad square jaw, innocent and adult. We were in a Brooklyn basement full of artists and sound-poets gathered to watch musicians throw down extreme noise improvisation. One…

If you’re trying to contribute as little as possible to the two global calamities of climate change and the swirling gyres of forever-materials slowly filling our oceans, there’s a useful formula to keep in mind: Use fewer things, many times, and don’t buy new ones. But are plastic bags better or…

At first, Chris Sawyer hated roller coasters. As a child growing up in Scotland, he rode them with a mix of curiosity and dread, screaming to get off every time he barreled through another stomach-flipping plunge. This is a common trait among people who ultimately become obsessed with theme parks.…

A TRAVELLER enters a hotel. She does not see any people behind the reception desk. Instead, a robot takes her name, checks her in, and hands over her room key. Another robot takes her suitcase and escorts her to her room, which has just been cleaned by yet another robot. Is this the future of…

Hannah Gadsby in “Nanette.” She said in an interview after her new show, “I wasn’t expecting global stardom,” and added, “Now I have everyone watching me.” Credit Ben King/Netflix MELBOURNE, Australia — In the smash hit show “Nanette” — which discussed homophobia, abuse and rape — the Australian…

For more than three decades, London has attracted global banks, trading operations, hedge funds, asset managers and sovereign wealth funds, becoming a global financial center second to none. Brexit has jeopardized that status. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times LONDON — In the political…

It’s been a little over a year since Facebook announced major algorithm changes that would decrease the amount of news in News Feed , instead prioritizing non-publisher content that spurs engagement and provokes comments. Fourteen or so months in, what does the news environment on Facebook look…

Banksy's anonymity makes it hard to authenticate his pieces and prints, so Banksy has created a nonprofit called "Pest Control" that issues certificates of authenticity: you send them an alleged Banksy print and £65 and if they agree that it's authentic, they'll return it with a certificate that has…

Designing Effective Countdown Clocks for the MTA Over the course of 2017, the MTA, overlord of New York’s transit system, took on the big and much-needed project of installing countdown clocks on all of its train lines, in every station. While they were an upgrade from nothing, the clocks showed…

This story is part of The Privacy Divide , a series that explores the fault lines and disparities—cultural, economic, philosophical—that have developed around digital privacy and its impact on society. “Ha, that’s funny!” My 21-year old sister would comment when she saw my mother’s most recent…

“The economy is just so damn strong right now and by all historic precedent the incumbent should run away with it,” said Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of TrendMacrolytics, a research firm whose model correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 win when most opinion polls did not. | Evan Vucci/AP…

David Plater UK / Getty Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. Like many Americans above grammar-school age , I seldom write by hand anymore, outside of barely legible grocery lists. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship,…

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Thinkstock and Facebook. On an otherwise ordinary Sunday in late January, a 32-year-old web editor for a chain of local radio stations in Central Texas ran across a news item that he found interesting. Ten minutes later, he had written and published what would…