Here's Peyton Manning's legacy among writers: He's so good that he turns metaphor against itself. You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage. Peyton Manning shreds the Eagles for 327 yards and four touchdowns in three quarters. Peyton Manning torches the NFL…

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00…

"Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry" http://t.co/ps6bYi20vI

Design Wants to Be Free The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World How Nerf Became the World’s Best Purveyor of Big Guns for Kids Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace…

Reynier was hoping to have a vineyardesque experience: a friendly proprietor, an extended tour, plenty of opportunities for firsthand research. Instead, he was greeted by a padlocked gate, a welter of hazardous-chemicals warnings, and a sign with a brusque message: “plant closed. no visitors.” He…

At our first official interview earlier in the day, Ocean spent the first five minutes staring down at his phone. He didn’t so much as look up at me, as I made small talk with his managers and awaited his attention. Eventually he said, “Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most…

Photo: Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty This piece was originally published on January 27, 2013. Steven Soderbergh has directed 26 films since his 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape — the behind-closed-doors portrait of yuppie Louisiana often credited with kick-starting the indie-film revolution of…

INT. A HOUSE IN THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS—NIGHT It’s quiet at this long, low ranch house up in Benedict Canyon even though it’s Saturday night. The year is 1974, and the decor reflects the era’s aesthetic: zebra rug, mod wallpaper and suede sofas facing a mirrored bar. This is a modern bachelor pad, a…

Youth Gone Wild The arcade has always been aligned with the coin-operated amusements industry, and — since the birth of pinball — with youth. By definition, an "amusement arcade" is a place that houses coin-operated machines, and for the first half of the 20th century, that meant pinball. The first…

1. DID YOU KNOW THAT THE PLACEMENT OF A CAMERA IN A FILM HAS A DIRECT EFFECT ON YOU AS A VIEWER? FOR SOME OF YOU, OF COURSE YOU KNOW THAT. FOR OTHERS, MAYBE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT. MAYBE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND JUST HOW MUCH A CERTAIN ANGLE AND WHAT IS PRECISELY SHOWN IN IT CONVEYS NOT JUST A VERY…

First thing in the morning, the king of Hollywood receives a phone call. The call always comes from New York. The reason is simple. New York, being three hours ahead of Los Angeles, always has The Numbers. And The Numbers—daily accountings of every dollar spent, every box-office receipt—are all that…

from Grantland: Home Page

“Good design makes a product understandable” – Dieter Rams Good navigation should do at least three things well: (1) it should allow the user to navigate; (2) it should serve as wayfinding, letting the user know where they are; and (3) it should help the user understand what the product is capable…

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell ( Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil ). The Obama campaign's technologists were tense…

Over the summer I chatted to Gilles Peterson for the " Mala in Cuba " sleeve notes... Blackdown: Hey Gilles, great to chat to you. So first of all, I’d love to know, really, about the beginning of this project. I didn’t raise it with Mala, I didn’t know whether it was appropriate or not but the…

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway…

Sorry to break it to you, but... "The internet IS real life." http://t.co/wa8EdUFR @dailydoseofjess / @STWnextness on point as always

TV The Men Behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable The creators of Mad Men , Breaking Bad , and Deadwood are this generation's auteurs. Brett Martin sits them down to discuss the future of television In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king—none more so than those emperors of the air that control…