AP Images/Ringer illustration The saga of rapper Azealia Banks’s entanglement with tech impresario Elon Musk and musician Grimes (Musk’s ex-girlfriend, maybe) grows longer each day. Banks was recently left wandering the billionaire’s mansion because Grimes asked her to come to L.A., and now both the…

STX Entertainment/Ringer illustration In a scene that shall live in infamy for the precious few who will see it, the puppet detective spews puppet ejaculate all over the room. The spewer in question is Phil Phillips, the hard-boiled, blue-skinned Los Angeles gumshoe at the center of The Happytime…

The safe move for Drew Michael , a well-regarded 33-year-old comic, would have been to make a typical debut television hour, stringing together his funniest jokes into a tight set performed in a packed theater. Instead, he took a risk, not to mention a stand in a simmering battle over the artistic…

In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope . An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being…

Around 25 years ago, Ty Hookway, founder of the upstate New York-based janitorial services company CleanCraft, was driving past one of their client’s houses when he noticed one of his workers’ cars parked in front. It was late–around 11 p.m.–so Hookway stopped to check in and see if everything was…

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Refinery29. The recently premiered Netflix show Insatiable could have been good television. Presumably intended to be a satirical, socially trenchant high school…

W isconsinites joke that there are two seasons in Wisconsin: winter and construction. As traffic crawls down the Interstate 94, sandwiched between endless columns of orange cones, construction is in full bloom. Mount Pleasant, a sleepy village of about 26,000 people in Racine County, halfway between…

Black Friday is synonymous with the image of consumers storming big box stores, but a growing number of shoppers are opting instead to stay home and get their deals from Amazon. In 2017, so many people chose to do so that as thousands of digital carts were being checked out, the wealth of Amazon CEO…

T ech companies love to depict themselves as garage-tinkering underdogs taking on big business. They conveniently ignore the fact that many of them are some of the largest corporations in the world, let alone the United States. There’s good reason for it. The level of scrutiny directed at large…

Photo: iStock Editor’s Note (8/1/2018): The original story that appeared here has been updated after editorial review. The reasons are outlined in the updated piece. On Thursday morning, The Root published an article written by this writer asserting my opinion that the 2016 election was hacked by…

Photo courtesy United States Department of Defense Light pollution is often characterised as a soft issue in environmentalism. This perception needs to change. Light at night constitutes a massive assault on the ecology of the planet, including us. It also has indirect impacts because, while 20 per…

Javier Zarracina/Vox Media Some time ago, I found myself in need of a vacation read. I am a book critic, so this was an easily solved problem: I perused the enormous pile of books on my desk that had been sent to me by publishers, found a galley that didn’t look too dark or esoteric, and set out for…

A drone photo of the collapsing Von Meck Estate in Khruslovka, Venyovsky district, Tula Oblast, south of Moscow, taken on May 27, 2016. Satellite view on Google Maps . # CC BY-SA Vadim Razumov / Wikipedia An abandoned Japanese lighthouse on a rock in the southern part of Sakhalin Island, Russia.…

Tuesday, with its criminal convictions of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, was a day for the optimists who think they can finally see the beginning of the end of the Trump Presidency. Photograph by Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Just before 5 P . M . on Tuesday, the afternoon of August 20,…

Minda Honey | Longreads | April 2018 | 20 minutes (4,980 words) Let’s start at 16-and-a-half, a half-a-lifetime ago. I was gone off this boy who lived around the corner from me. He was two grades ahead in school, a senior. We rode the bus together. His name sang with alliteration fit for a…

A universal basic income, with the government providing, say, $1,000 a month to each and every American, is impossible. It would cost too much. That is the most common objection to the idea of universal basic income, or UBI, which is growing more and more popular every year. Chicago is proposing a…

Officially, “Respect” is a relationship song. That’s how Otis Redding wrote it. But love wasn’t what Aretha Franklin was interested in. The opening line is “What you want, baby, I got it.” But her “what” is a punch in the face. So Ms. Franklin’s rearrangement was about power. She had the right to be…

(CNN) Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday to eight criminal counts including tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump. Cohen said in a plea deal that "in…

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on Tuesday in his financial fraud trial, bringing a dramatic end to a politically charged case that riveted the capital. The verdict was a victory for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose…

A s the film world prepares to leave the childish things of summer behind and welcome the more serious, artistically ambitious movies of festival and awards season, it’s an opportune moment to consider the Canon: that list of revered films that helped form cinematic language, broke it open, captured…

Screenshot: Serralves Museum ( YouTube ) Like a real-life version of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a visitor to a Portuguese museum was injured last week when he stepped into an art installation resembling an inky void. Currently on exhibit at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Descent Into Limbo by Anish…

LOS ANGELES — “Crazy Rich Asians,” powered by jubilant reviews and pent-up demand for a major Hollywood film led by Asian stars, took in a strong $25.2 million at North American theaters over the weekend, easily enough for No. 1. It was the best result for a PG-13 romantic comedy in six years —…

Protesters toppled the Silent Sam Confederate statue on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill on Monday night. The monument came down after 9:15 p.m. Earlier in the evening, protesters covered the statue with gray banners, erecting “an alternative monument” that said, in part, “For a world without white…

Ann Hermes/AP It took a lot less than you'd think for myself and my fellow teens to steal the midterms. It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections. Once I accessed the shockingly simple and vulnerable set of tables that make up the state election board’s database, I was…

The product of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s memoir, “Unhinged,” is not simply insider information but the idea that she may have outmaneuvered Trump. Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” the new dish from Omarosa Manigault Newman, is,…

As a teenager in the early 2000s, I was a member of a large, passionate, and loosely affiliated community of Harry Potter lovers (known, like other, similar communities, as a fandom), mostly gathered on LiveJournal. We discussed the books and characters; we wrote fanfiction and long diatribes about…

For 70 days at the beginning of this year, Daniel Ek and a group of friends competed to see who could cut their body-fat percentage the most. Ek, the 35-year-old cofounder and CEO of the streaming service Spotify, went on a special regimen, which included twice-a-day workouts and a single…

I magine a city at 50C (122F). The pavements are empty, the parks quiet, entire neighbourhoods appear uninhabited. Nobody with a choice ventures outside during daylight hours. Only at night do the denizens emerge, HG Wells-style, into the streets – though, in temperatures that high, even darkness no…

About halfway through Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning directorial debut Get Out , protagonist Chris Washington (played by Black Panther ’s underused Daniel Kaluuya) is pretty sure he’s in serious trouble. As a black man making his first trip to visit his girlfriend Rose’s rich, liberal, white parents,…

Throughout her three years at Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends , Lacy made it her mission to hire a woman into a leadership role. Lacy had heard plenty of excuses for why her female job candidates weren’t Riot material. Some were “ladder climbers.” Others had “too much ego.” Most…

“I didn’t feel like I had a prayer,” said Crystal Thompson of Eight Mile, Ala., whom Walmart accused — mistakenly, an employee later acknowledged — of shoplifting about $70 in groceries. A lawyer for Walmart threatened a lawsuit if she didn’t pay $200. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times By…

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — Faced with nearly incomprehensible inflation — 32,714 percent as of Wednesday — Venezuelan officials thought they had a solution: They changed the color of the bank notes and increased their denomination. Then they said they would lop off three zeros. And when that didn’t seem…

A cryptic missive went out last spring to all 3.6 million people who follow McDonald’s on Twitter. The tweet read, simply: “100% Fresh Beef + John Goodman = ASMR(ish)” and included a link to a video. In the split-screen clip , the Big Lebowski and Roseanne star stares into the camera and—somewhat…

Showing up when it matters is one of the easiest ways to make friends (and keep them). Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. What a lot of people don’t appear to understand is that the single easiest way to make friends is to show up when it…

“Korn, Manson, Bizkit—that was the golden age of music, I believe. And after us, it died.” Jonathan Davis, who at 47 has been Korn’s lead singer for more than half of his life, does not sound wistful, or even boastful. He is matter of fact, as though he were describing how his tangled locks are now…

Aretha Franklin performing in 1970. Photograph by Michael Ochs / Getty Aretha Franklin’s voice was a pure, painful, and unforgettable expression of American history and American feeling, the collective experience of black Americans and her own life. The Queen of Soul was the daughter of the most…