The latest reason to be pissed at Facebook was the company’s decision to force users to download Facebook Messenger if they’d like to be able to read, access, or send messages on their phones. It’s not a surprising strategy for Mark Zuckerberg & Co. (I’ll get more into that in a minute.) And,…

Recently, my nine year-old nephew came running into the room, eager to find a seat to watch a performance by Iggy Azalea on an awards show. He sat, enraptured by her performance, yelling, “Iggy!” utterly oblivious to the look of chagrin and dismay on my face, as I, too, tuned in to watch this white…

One of the first ever online journalists for the BBC is a close colleague of mine. These days, you’d say he was the most experienced member of the team. But back in the 90s, when the BBC was still finding itself online, it was decided that his job would be “internet correspondent”. Internet…

It hasn't been a good week for HP. On the back of lower-than-expected earnings, the tech titan also announced it would cut between 11,000 and 16,000 employees. Sadly, HP is in good (or bad, if you wish) company. Oracle has missed estimates more often than it has hit them the past few years, most…

Illustration: Getty When iOS 8 hits, the notification center is going to be the most important screen in your iPhone. Think about it: Notifications already are the way you know about everything that happens without having to fire up an app. A notification lets you know you have a new email, a new…

I’ve spent the last couple of days sifting through the announcements at WWDC. Apple claims 4000 new APIs, and it certainly feels like it. Apple has been busy. But setting aside all the normal incremental improvements, there are a couple of interesting strands. First, Apple is continuing the steady…

Comic Books It seems like the comic-book bubble will never pop — but Marvel isn’t too big to fail Over the last couple of weeks, I binge-watched all 22 episodes from the first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Like many viewers, I had enjoyed the pilot, in which a minor character from the…

Here are some things I remember being told when I was younger, probably after my dismayed parents grew frustrated with the many hours I spent binging on Saved by the Bell  and  Full House and  Salute Your Shorts : TV rots your brain. Too much television will turn you into a zombie. Go read a book.…

The greatest jokes, Louis C.K. tells me, never register as jokes. Not quite. The punch line of a great joke may punctuate it and make people laugh, "but it doesn't  solve  the joke, doesn't stop it, so the joke keeps going and going and going..." And the more it keeps going, he explains, the more…

It has been a long time coming, creeping ever closer with each new luxury condo and $8 million townhouse sale, every $17 bowl of ramen , $10 latte and cup of cold-pressed beet-and-kale juice, but now the end is finally upon us: Brooklyn is over. Done. Finished. Brooklyn as brand has overtaken…

The following is part of a larger piece I've been working on to explain hyper-gentrification, today's form of gentrification. It's also a response to the Spike Lee brouhaha. It's rather lengthy. I hope you'll stick with it. Motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus   Last week, filmmaker Spike Lee spoke…

We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. Some of us like his screens more than our families. For years, Ive’s natural…

by Maria Popova “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.” “Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself,” Umberto Eco…

Ezra Klein spoke last week at a conference on health care. He is leaving The Washington Post for a digital start-up. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press After a week of speculation, it turns out that Ezra Klein, the prolific creator of The Washington Post’s Wonkblog , will be going to Vox Media, the…

Editor’s note: The excerpt below comes from a book published in 1875: A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B. Hartley. Hartley’s rules may be over 100 years old, but they’re just as true today as they ever were. There are some real gems here — some of which truly gave me a chuckle. 1. Even if…

He’s the creative force behind two recent pop hits, a philanthropist, fashion designer, tech entrepreneur, and more. How Pharrell Williams does it all. Pharrell Williams is on a Gravity high. “Whew! Whew!” he says. “Listen to me, it is crazy.” The 40-year-old musician, producer, and mini mogul is…

Like seemingly everyone below 14th Street , the guy at Turntable Lab in the East Village knows Aziz Ansari. So does the barista at Abraço Espresso, the manager at the Bowery Hotel, the bartender at Parm, and at least a dozen people on the sidewalk, all of whom he’ll run into over the course of a…

Why should a young man listen to an old guy about the best way to become a man? Because the typical teen is not yet able to see a future past the next few months. That’s not a fault of character, but the fact that teens’ brains have not yet physically matured. The pre-fontal cortex (PFC) does not…

Skip to content, or skip to search. Skip to content, or skip to search. One of the odd things about traveling between the Bay Area and New York a lot is the asynchronicity of mass culture between coasts: That is, the things that get popular in the Bay Area (PostMates, Burning Man) don’t always get…

Mia Quagliarello:

“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Tony Soprano said these words in 1999, midway through the pilot of The Sopranos. He was right about his place in the history of…

Skip to content, or skip to search. Skip to content, or skip to search. I joined Twitter, with very bad grace, on March 5, 2010. I was a few months away from publishing my first book, and my agent, editor, publicist, and assorted other media-savvy types sat me down and informed me that if I cared…

Ryan Lawler, a TechCrunch reporter, wrote a post about Uber the other day. It got a lot of attention. Not because it was a scoop or juicy nugget of information about a red-hot startup that’s now worth ~$3.5 billion, but because the entire thing was made up. A satire. Except some people didn’t…

er afternoon, herds of elderly tourists—American, Japanese, British—wander between the gift shops and sip lagers at pavement cafés beneath the gothic town hall. In a park, teenagers chat and smoke cigarettes in the sun.

When episodes of popular television shows end, the deadline pressure begins for a legion of writers whose episodic recaps of shows have become a cornerstone of the industry. WSJ’s John Jurgensen and Television Without Pity’s Daniel Manu join Lunch Break. Photo: AMC. The biggest challenges facing…

When it IPO’d in 2004, Google described its startup ideal of “20 percent time,” where any employee could take a day’s worth of time out of the normal work week and come up with a cool project to work on. And it worked: Google came up with a lot of really cool stuff. So much cool stuff that Google,…

By Hamish McKenzie On August 12, 2013 At South By Southwest in March, Google[x]’s “Captain of Moonshots” told an audience that Elon Musk is a “national treasure.” Musk’s brilliance doesn’t come from being the world’s smartest man, said Astro Teller, who is responsible for overseeing Google’s…

In six seconds, you’ll hate me. But in six months, you’ll be a better writer. From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs.  These include:  Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you…

Parks and Recreation fans were surprised yesterday to find out that Rashida Jones and Rob Lowe will be leaving the show halfway through the coming season. It is sort of a bummer, because they are two hugely likable people, and Parks ' signature is how much it convinces you to just love it and its…

Considering how American the feeling is, there should be a word in English for the despair that attends our moments of racial atomization. Every few years, an event flares through the unsheathed wiring of our collective guilt, enmity, and shame, and it feels like we have fewer words than ever. We…