carianoff/flickr Last month, my wife and I found ourselves in a disagreement about whether or not our apartment was clean enough for guests—the type of medium-sized disagreement that likely plagues all close relationships. In the midst of it, there was a lull and, feeling exhausted all of a sudden,…

A church sitting vacant on Thursday in Buffalo, which has lost more than 10 percent of its population since 2000. Credit... Brendan Bannon for The New York Times ALBANY — New York, whose status as the most populous state has long been ceded, will soon fall behind Florida into fourth place, a…

'At Macy's, we have upheld the tradition and believe in our hearts that there is only one Santa Claus,' the company said, confusingly. Photograph: PCL /Alamy At 2.2m sq ft, the sprawling branch of Macy’s at Herald Square, New York, is the largest department store in the US and its Santaland Junction…

Edward J. Snowden delivered an alternative Christmas message on British television. The former American security contractor warned of the dangers posed by the loss of privacy. LONDON — In a message broadcast Wednesday on British television, Edward J. Snowden, the former American security contractor,…

City officials hope a judge’s ruling allowing bankruptcy will release Detroit from the grip of creditors and move it toward recovery. Credit... Joshua Lott/Reuters DETROIT — In a ruling that could reverberate far beyond Detroit, a federal judge held on Tuesday that this battered city could formally…

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Patrick Semansky / AP file The National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md. A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any…

winguero: Lamenting lost sunlight in the shadows of New York's rising towers: http://t.co/N8uIy6CEaz

ehgates: This Is Your Brain on Gluten - Atlantic Mobile http://t.co/8RudSwcjYa

Why should Edward Snowden be given amnesty? The question keeps coming up, though it can be hard to hear the answers amid the outbursts it provokes. That is a shame, because there are really two separate cases for why Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who passed a huge stash of…

The Media Equation Last week, a study commissioned by the president concluded that the National Security Agency had reached too far into the private lives of Americans. The study, which came after a series of journalistic revelations exposing the agency’s surveillance practices, recommended numerous…

Satellite dishes in Cornwall, England, at an outpost of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters. The agency has worked closely with the United States. Credit... Kieran Doherty/Reuters Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,…

jennydeluxe: Nico Muhly on Beyoncé is truly perfection http://t.co/MNQgP2eXcY

It has been nearly 15 years since music journalist Jim DeRogatis caught the story that has since defined his career, one that he wishes didn’t exist: R. Kelly’s sexual predation on teenage girls. DeRogatis, at that time the pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times , was anonymously delivered the…

I have a house and, like most houses, it’s an unfinished work. There are cracks in the paint. There are piles of old clothes and shoes exploding out of the laundry room, which doubles as a storage room because we don’t have a storage room. The walls in our bedroom are bare because we haven’t had…

These are some pieces I’ve written for Grantland about R. Kelly: “ R. Kelly Is Coming Back … Again ” — March 21, 2012 “ Trapped in the Closet Is ‘Forever,’ Starting Today ” — October 17, 2012 “ Listen to R. Kelly’s Tribute to the Kids of Newtown, Connecticut ” — January 4, 2013 “ Rembert Explains…

Where Children Sleep is an eye-opening project by photographer James Mollison that takes a look at children from all across the globe and the diverse environments they go to sleep in. The series presents a portrait of each child or adolescent accompanied by a shot of their bedrooms. While some have…

Matt McGee/Flickr Times are good for the National Football League. Viewership is up . For the 47th year in a row, Harris Interactive named pro football the most popular sport in America. And with overall revenues north of $9 billion, the NFL is the most lucrative sports league on the planet. That’s…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation hoodie Edward Snowden often wore to work in his NSA Hawaii ... [+] office. (Credit: Frederic Jacobs via Flickr, Creative Commons) Perhaps Edward Snowden's hoodie should have raised suspicions. The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier…

“Suppose, for instance, that there is a person living in New York City who has a phone number that meets the RAS standard and is approved as a ‘seed,’ ” Judge Richard Leon writes in a broad opinio n finding that the National Security Agency’s “telephony metadata” program is likely unconstitutional.…

Reuters On my wedding day, my wife and I hired a couple of shuttle vans to ferry guests between a San Clemente hotel and the nearby site where we held our ceremony and reception. I thought of our friends and family members packed into those vehicles when I read about the latest nightmarish…

Charlamagne Tha God, a host of “The Breakfast Club,” is known for his barbed interviews. Credit... Deidre Schoo for The New York Times Charlamagne Tha God, the shock-jock host of 105.1’s morning show, “The Breakfast Club,” has a penchant for making his guests squirm. When Justin Bieber arrived to…

Roderick, who is gay, came to New York after family ties became too strained, saying, “I’m just basically dead to my family now.” Credit... Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The AIDS epidemic in America is rapidly becoming concentrated among poor, young black and Hispanic men who have sex with…

willystaley: Would you like to have your breath stolen clean away? A new Rachel Monroe piece about firefighters... who set fires. http://t.co/lsmVcNGBdK

David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine A merica is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part…

In an effort to gin up a bit of publicity for its annual choice for “Person of the Year,” Time has released its list of ten finalists. They include Pope Francis, President Obama, Jeff Bezos, Miley Cyrus, Ted Cruz, and two Middle Eastern leaders: Bashar al-Assad, the embattled President of Syria, and…

Getty Images Follow @TIMEWorld Why is Tina Turner switching from American to Swiss citizenship? The legendary singer, a longtime Zurich resident, told the Blick newspaper that she has been very happy in Switzerland and “can’t imagine a better place to live.” But some observers believe she may be one…

moorehn: A great, great Carrick Mollenkamp story on how quantitative easing is affecting workers. http://t.co/PPno57Pwxj

YourAnonNews: Major profile of @ggreenwald and Snowden in @RollingStone --> http://t.co/GfuR8UiONJ

GuardianUS: RT @guardian: R Kelly: 'Weak people are the ones that are the haters': http://t.co/inODVgMrS9

For Doug Mills – the longtime White House photographer for The Times – what happened on Veterans Day was more than annoying. It was wrong. He and other Washington journalists had been hearing that the oldest World War II veteran alive was coming to Washington to commemorate the occasion. But they…

News Analysis Cycling past a Detroit wall on Tuesday. A judge’s ruling has given distressed cities leverage to backtrack on pension promises. Credit... Joshua Lott/Reuters Someday, Detroit’s bankruptcy may well be seen as the start of an era of broken promises. For years, cities have promised…

Opponents of a proposed ban on electronic cigarettes in public places puffed at a City Council health committee hearing on Wednesday. Credit... Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times A woman in a skintight dress lounged in the front row of the City Council chamber on Wednesday, sucking on an electronic…

Charles Dharapak / AP There’s a classic experiment on delayed gratification, in which kids who chose to wait and eat two marshmallows later, rather than eating a single marshmallow right away, tended to achieve more later in life. Discipline in the face of these sticky sugar blobs seemed to indicate…

The Media Equation Since its founding in 1968, New York magazine has served as a prototype of literate, high-tempo publishing, using its weekly cadence and location in one of the world’s cultural capitals to usher in a new, more intimate and frank approach to what a publication could be. Using the…

It was a cold, clear day in Leesburg, Va., and a security guard at an outlet mall there said the midmorning crowd was similar to that of a typical busy Saturday. But an ordinary day it was not. It was Black Friday, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year. With the economy bumping along at…

Drone delivery - fact or fiction? Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, chief executive Jeff Bezos has said. The drones, called Octocopters, could deliver packages weighing up to 2.3kg to customers within 30 minutes of them placing the…

U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries may be militarily effective, but they are killing innocent civilians in a way that is obscene and immoral. I’m afraid that ignoring this ugly fact makes Americans complicit in murder. It is understandable why President Obama has made…