TV shows are rarely underrated anymore. The days of a pretty good show having one season and getting canceled (“Freaks and Geeks” being a prime example) are, for the most part, over. Now there are fan blogs and “f yeah” Tumblrs that allow fan bases to be very vocal and create a buzz that sometimes…

A Critic at Large Out of Bethlehem August 17, 2015 Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in April, 1967, reporting the story that became “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” “That piece is a blank for me,” she said later.Photograph by Ted Streshinsky / Corbis In the late spring of 1967, Joan Didion,…

The evolutionary value of ‘artistic‘ skills when predators are few The magnificent riflebird ( Ptiloris magnificus ) has evolved in a habitat largely free of predators and other existential threats. T

The Greats Credit...Portrait by Craig McDean. Styled by Mel Ottenberg I DRESSED VERY CAREFULLY for her, the way I would for a good friend, thinking hard about what she likes. What I think she likes. I ordered Uber Black — the highest level of Uber I’ve ridden. The driver said it would be about an…

Frank Ocean / frankocean.tumblr.com I was in bed with a stranger when I first saw a tweet about Frank Ocean’s now infamous 2012 Tumblr post—the one in which the singer revealed that his debut album, Channel Orange, was, in part, about a boy. It was the middle of the night, and I turned over to check…

For most writers, cool is a word that rarely tops the list of personality descriptors. Neurotic and introverted are generally in heavier rotation. For women writers, you can add solipsistic and confessional. Maybe that’s part of the reason Joan Didion, who’s been called all those things but for whom…

In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white. We will use the pr

by Joe Berkowitz and Hallie Bateman Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of…

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily…

Cultural Comment September 30, 2015 Max Martin, pictured at the 2015 Grammy Awards, has written nearly two dozen No. 1 songs, for performers including Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL TRAN / FILMMAGIC VIA GETTY Among the stranger aspects of recent pop music history…

BENJAMIN FERNANDEZ B: Sobre la decadente educación paraguaya. http://t.co/FTUOvMhJm8

They begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally, than before

I’ve written and rewritten this blog in my head several times over the past few months. As many of you know, I have been recovering from anorexia since April. I was at an Ivy League school, a D-1 athlete and should have been living my dream. Nobody expected me to end up in the hospital with an…

Obituary | AP Already have an account?Log in Continue with a free trial Get full access to our independent journalism for free Free trial Or create a free account to unlock just this article Create account Obituary August 26th 2006 →Alfredo Stroessner Reuse this content The Economist today…

The backstory to E•MO•TION doesn’t really matter, but here it is anyway: Carly Rae Jepsen came in third place on Canadian Idol in 2007, and then she went on to co-write and record “Call Me Maybe,” a song that became an inescapable 2012 summer jam after Justin Bieber liked it and then Bieber’s…

Page-Turner August 6, 2015 For seven years, Brazenhead Books operated out of an apartment at 235 East Eighty-fourth Street. It was, strictly speaking, illegal, and because it was illegal it had to be secret.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BRIAN PATRICK EHA I suppose it’s O.K. to give away the address now. The…

Tavi Gevinson: oh my goddess. this whole interview. the photos! i love @OfficialWillow so hard. https://t.co/vdaldvwMHk http://t.co/I1vWQxL7tY

Gabby Smith is not exactly on vacation. But seated in the sun next to a roaring waterfall in the middle of upstate New York, she may as well be. In reality, the twenty-six year-old singer behind Eskimeaux is in the middle of an exhausting four-week tour. It’s mid-April now, and Gabby has been on the…

The human journey has always been marked by our quest to understand love in order to reap its fruits. We have captured that ever-shifting understanding in some breathtakingly beautiful definitions. There is Susan Sontag, who marveled in her diary: “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except…

Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.” Don’t misunderstand, it’s not the fact that a startup’s blog…

Illustration by Kendra. As our moms, teachers, and even CERTAIN WEBSITES repeatedly stress, nothing on the internet ever truly disappears. The internet has held a record of some very painful and embarrassing stages of my life. My online identity remains a fixed being, even while my in-person…

The day before my friend Tayler Smith and I found out our photo series was appropriated into the New Yorker, I woke up to a text message from another friend. We’re psychic sisters; she has a nightmare

Facebook today is rolling out “instant articles,” quick-loading stories from publishers including The New York Times and BuzzFeed that load on Facebook’s flagship app 10 times faster than before. The articles, which are hosted on Facebook’s servers, are well designed and create a genuinely better…

I almost got fired once. My friend, and CTO at the time, Dustin Moskovitz pulled me into a room one morning. He told me I would no longer be working on News Feed, which was surprising because at the time I was the only engineer keeping it running. Instead they were going to hand it off to someone…

Columns Critic Meaghan Garvey looks at how Internet fatigue is showing up in music. May 26, 2015 I’ll always associate the year 2011 with Glass Swords, the debut album from Rustie, the Glaswegian producer of the Hudson Mohawke school of aesthetics. It’s kind of lazy to hold up cover artwork as a…

We all have those annoying friends on Facebook. They’ll tag you in unflattering pictures, they send too many messages, and they get touchy when you unfriend or unfollow them for doing so. But the new teen-horror flick Unfriended proves that the worst kind of Facebook friend, beyond the new moms and…

What the hell is everyone doing? And more importantly, why is everyone doing what they’re doing? It’s Wednesday evening and through the lens of the people I follow on Twitter–a collection of people I know well, kind of know, don’t know but what to know, and absolutely can’t stand–I’m convinced I’ve…

Books February 9, 2015 It’s hard to envision the Nordic model ever finding a home on these shores.Illustration by Script & Seal Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at…

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devon $. maloney: .@lindseyweber is correct, Ace IS the worst. http://t.co/BVZI8RTWHf

Hanging from scaffolding on an in-progress luxury condo near Sufjan Stevens ’ office studio in Brooklyn, a huge sign promises to “preserve the history but change the meaning.” The phrase is a euphemis

What is a piece of writing if no one reads it, if no one can attribute it to your name? The work is for you, and only you, meaning that, among other things, the cesspool of internet comments is easily avoided. You become your own worst critic, and best champion, and criticism — helpful or otherwise…

Culture Desk November 21, 2013 Anybody who reports on the arts will eventually feel the fear of crying wolf: If I tell people that I just saw the greatest thing ever, will it undo the last time I said it? How many times can you say something like that before all the claims coalesce into a weak mist…

Paste | A.V. Club | Jezebel | Splinter Latest News Film TV Music Games AV Undercover Books Aux Newsletter Instagram Twitter YouTube Facebook Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed. Latest News TV Film Music Games AV Undercover Featured Movies Top Chef's "Restaurant Wars" turns…

Photo: Bobby Doherty Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a…

flavia lacerda: Being Winona In A World Made For Gwyneths http://t.co/XQtZXzDHYV

Hazel Cills: wrote about diary writing for Rookie : http://t.co/RDKuPaPGIV

Whether it’s cucumbers splashing into water or models sitting smugly next to a pile of vegetables, it’s tough not to be sucked in by the detox industry. The idea that you can wash away your calorific sins is the perfect antidote to our fast-food lifestyles and alcohol-lubricated social lives. But…