Your email has been sent. An error has occured and your email has not been sent. Please try again. PHILADELPHIA—More than 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley, in a small home office with a dog bed under the desk, sits a man on the cutting edge of the apps boom. Loren Brichter isn’t a household name. Nor…

By David Holmes On March 19, 2013 Remember the time the New Yorker asked readers to “like” them on Facebook by promising exclusive “liker”-only access to a new Jonathan Franzen story? Well, this is kind of like that but worse. Earlier today, Vanity Fair published an “article” asking readers to help…

A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional services for an article they sought to publish after reading my story “25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy: Rodman trip…

One thing that has really been on my mind lately is how publishing is changing. Many think it is a bit crazy that I went with a paywall, but even more crazy is that I was thinking of shutting down the site as it is and doing a periodical on the iPad instead (cooler heads prevailed). I have a ton of…

Ted:  She chews loudly. Why do you think we call her Chewbacca? Marshall: Because she’s loyal, wears shiny belts, and I resemble a young Harrison Ford. Shortly after this scene in How I Met Your Mother ’s “Spoiler Alert” episode, Marshall experiences a sinking realization that his fiancée Lilly…

(For the next several days, some of our writers will be swapping duties on some of our most popular shows. Some of them will like what they see, but for different reasons. Some of them will have vastly different opinions from the regular reviewers. And some of them won’t be all that different. It’s…

It is June 2, 2010 and Mark Zuckerberg is sweating. He’s wearing his hoodie—he’s always wearing his hoodie—and he’s on stage and either the lights or the questions are too hot. His hosts are asking him about the privacy overreaches of Facebook. He’s uncomfortable. He’s mopping his brow. He…

“Jess, can I say something that’ll potentially not help this situation?”—Nick Miller Here’s the thing that I really respect about New Girl’s decision to smash Nick and Jess’ faces together: For all the hesitation in “Cooler,” for all the ways this type of physical connection was put off or denied,…

ONE morning in mid-December, Pope Benedict XVI gazed down on an iPad and composed his first tweet . From a marketing perspective, it was about time. While the pontiff had been issuing his traditional encyclicals online, other world leaders were venturing further, onto Facebook and Twitter. The…

Some people hate year-end-list season. I get that. It dovetails with the December holidays, which also drive a lot of people nuts and for many of the same reasons: the oppressive omnipresence of it all; the feeling of mandatory participation; the convergence upon a single consensus choice that…

Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: Jay-Z struggled long and hard to go from a childhood in New York’s Marcy Projects and a young…

If asked to identify the Office equivalent of jumping the shark, I’d go with “drowning the car.” That scene in “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”—when Michael misinterprets the instructions of a GPS device and takes a right turn into a lake—comes early in the series, but it’s affected the way I’ve viewed The…

Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing By Gary Wolf The Wired Interview Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Although NeXT failed to sell its elegant and infamously buggy…

In the summer of 2007, Eve Mosher, an artist who grew up in Texas and lives in New York, bought a machine known as a Heavy Hitter. Heavy Hitters are typically used to produce the white chalk lines found on Little League fields, but Mosher had an entirely different purpose in mind. She filled the…

By Hamish McKenzie On October 25, 2012 Right in the midst of a tumultuous reorganization of magazine publishing, Vox Media has launched the latest in a growing stable of ambitious digital publications that merge high-end production values with the immediacy and flexibility of the Web. Polygon, a…

I’ve been thinking about Louis CK lately. I’m a fan of his show on FX, and I’m so happy his recent adventure in distributing his newest comedy special himself has been a rousing success. But my thoughts are going elsewhere to wonder why he has blown up in popularity in the past couple years, and why…

Did you read that study about how partisanship has increased in the United States? Among other things, the study states that the split between Republicans and Democrats is now worse than whatever animus exists between black and white people and that it grew exponentially between 2008 and 2010—nearly…

End it already: When cancellation is the best thing that can happen to a TV series  The ideal television series is a perpetual-motion machine. It runs on a combination of external and internal energy sources: Viewership and ad revenues are the ones the people at the controls truly care about, but…