Is Batman gay? According to my seventh grade schoolmates, Batman is “Sooooo Gay,” and so was I. It’s certainly a popular opinion among those with a basic understanding of psychology, one shared by not
Voyages How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy 1 / 5 Lynn Douglas, left, lives in a German Baptist community in Ohio. Steve King (in green shirt) is a train buff who has written books about
The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making... somethin
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his lat
Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Ri
Press play on this extended video of Guaraldi’s classic, and we dare you not to feel all kinds of good, holiday, dancey vibes In early 1964 , a short piece in the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned tha
What is the secret of great writing? For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun . For Henry Miller, about discovery . Susan Sontag saw it as self-exploration . Many literary greats anchored it to thei
When the email arrived, Jordan Walker wasn’t ready for it. The message was from Ryan Hoover, founder and CEO of Product Hunt , a site that surfaces cool new projects. It was a heads-up about the next
J ames Bond is headed back to the big screen next year, and the new film finally has a name: Spectre . Bond superfans are giddy about this title. Here’s why. Luckily, Spectre is easier to decipher tha
In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to rank 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate? Th
Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into
She hates mint. Don’t even get her started on mint. She is 5-foot-2, drives a Honda CR-V, and has very detailed opinions on printer cartridges, tax preparation software, and five flavors of Burt’s Bee
Everyone loves to hate the hipster. A mere mention of the word hipster seems to conjure some primal, collective anger—anger directed at skinny jeans, fake reading glasses, unkempt beards, flannel, and
(Photo: Anna Omelchenko/Shutterstock) Disillusioned? Has your initial idealism been ground into cynicism? Dismayed by discovering how things really work? There’s a term for what you’re suffering: Welt
A WORK OF FICTION The Sixth Borough Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won't read about it in any of the history books, because there's nothing -- save for the circumstantial evi
A year ago, Justine Sacco sent out a tweet and then boarded a plane. By the time she landed, her career was derailed, her reputation was shredded, and her relative anonymity had been replaced by the w
I ts achievements are undeniable. Having hosted what some historians call the greatest creation of wealth in human history, 1 the San Francisco Bay Area had the fastest growth rate in the United State
Every few months, RollingStone.com will shine a spotlight on a forgotten, neglected, overshadowed, underappreciated and/or critically maligned film that we love in a new series we’re calling “Be Kind,
Why have we turned into compulsive obsession-seekers? Yearbook photo courtesy of This American Life . Still of Matthew McConaughey from HBO. Still of Smarf from Adult Swim. Three people from high scho
“ Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural ,” and “ Ferguson, Missouri Looks Like A Rap Video ”: So declared headlines on two consecutive days this past August from early adulthood-angst purveyor Thought Cata
I n the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that ha
It’s a tall tale that is repeated affectionately by the whizzes inside the futuristic lab because it captures the urgency and aspiration of their boss to move technology forward. The Google CEO is the
Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: This story is part of our January/February 2015 issue See the rest of the issue Subscribe In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear…
As an introvert myself, this piece really resonated with me. Sorry I killed everybody! I just really need my alone time. Sorry that everyone is dead. They weren't respecting my quiet power and inner s
UPDATE. I am living a nightmare before lunchtime. First, the sofa delivery people gave me a window of 7 AM to 7 PM, so I'm a prisoner in my own apartment. Second, worse, I am out of cat food, and in c
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Get lost Published in theFOMO · 3 min read · Sep 15, 2014 -- Feed your soul through traveling solo with minimal planning I believe that there are two types of traveling: (1) Those that relax the mind,
There’s a little flea market down the road from us, just a few tables and a coffee stall every Saturday in the summer, where one of the regulars is an oldish bloke who sells men’s trinkets: penknives,
The Truth About Charli No lie: Charli XCX, the songwriting, chorus- belting force behind hits like “I Love It,” “Boom Clap,” and “Fancy,” is primed to change the landscape of pop music. she’s having a
I process email for a living, or at least it seems that way most of the time. Hundreds of new messages arrive on a daily basis, some of them so dull and uninformative they make me want to go find a pe
Published in Starts With A Bang! · 7 min read · Sep 18, 2014 -- How to destroy an Alderaan-sized planet. “What’s that star? It’s the Death Star. What does it do? It does Death. It does Death, buddy. G
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When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger? , in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They probably weren’t thinking about lo
Start giving your money and time away: New research shows you’ll be happier for it. Americans who describe themselves as “very happy” volunteer an average of 5.8 hours per month. Those who are “unhapp
Ray Ozzie’s new app Talko hopes to give people their voices back Published in Backchannel · 18 min read · Sep 23, 2014 -- I. It is a gorgeous late summer afternoon, and I am sitting with Ray Ozzie in
At the risk of painting too broad a stroke, it seems to me that much of the opposition to changes wrought by the Internet undervalue the positive impact said changes have on normal people. For example
If you consider yourself a reader, you’ve probably heard the web is destroying your ability to focus and financially crippling the people that write for you. But Aaron Lammer, cofounder and editor of
Published in The Bold Italic · 7 min read · Sep 23, 2014 -- By Kevin Lewis T his is a city of famously diverse neighborhoods, and looking at the history of our ’hoods gives us insight into some very S
"Right, right, we are the outdated institutions who need to catch up with the times," says a person in the attorney general’s office, who doesn't want to be named for fear of seeming against tech. This has happened with a number of Silicon Valley companies. They come in thinking they don't have…
Illustration by Ruby A. I like arguing. Not the screaming and shouting kind—what I enjoy is calmly, respectfully, and thoughtfully debating people whose opinions differ from mine. And if I can get the