Freebooters may be helping to establish Facebook as a destination of choice for viral video online. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Screenshot via Facebook. Photos by Thinkstock. Destin Sandlin is a missile flight test engineer from Alabama who moonlights as a YouTube star. His science-y…

My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team Photoshop, Ethnography, and User-centered Design Almost two years ago, the Photoshop team pivoted to focus its energies and resources on design features and workflows. To be successful, the team needed to understand trends in design and tools,…

David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed In his new book Between the World and Me , Ta-Nehisi Coates writes almost dreamily about the Mecca for black education in this country, Howard University. In the midst of a passage on his time there, Coates takes the reader on a pleasant tour of The Yard, the central…

Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl? In February, at the Code/Media * conference in Dana Point, California, some of the most powerful people in media found themselves discussing an unsettling story published two weeks prior. The piece predicted that the future of the internet…

illustrator Anafelle Liu 1.2 Share on Tumblr E-mail Editor's Note: In keeping with what’s clearly become a habit for the Social Issues section, we give the floor over to an under-heard—and in this case, quite controversial—voice in society: the police officer. This being Grey , hers is no ordinary…

Released on September 11, 2001, ‘The Blueprint’ should’ve been lost to history. The world as we knew it was collapsing around us, yet somehow the album not only succeeded but made history of its own. It was Jay Z’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece, a monumental achievement that disrupted the tides of…

In February 1939, Vogue ran a major feature on the fashions of the future. Inspired by the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, the magazine asked nine industrial designers to imagine what the people of ‘a far Tomorrow’ might wear and why. (The editors deemed fashion designers too of-the-moment for…

A 1970 printing of the 1933 corrected reissue. Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times. Prop stylist: Emily Mullin Until the appearance of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language was the pre-­eminent authority on spelling and usage. Titanic an…

RICHARD TURLEY: A Lazy Modernist in Corporate America RICHARD TURLEY has created some of the most unapologetic, visually incisive magazine covers of the new millennium. Fresh off the success of rebooting a struggling print publication for executives, he now hopes to revitalize a cable network for…

Photo: HBO I have a little bone to pick with capable fellow art-writer Hannah Ghorashi and the marvelous ArtNews blog. Ghorashi (whom I've never met) writes a regular column called "Price Check ." She goes to galleries and asks front-desk employees how much works of art cost, if they're sold, and…

Before The New York Times 's investigative report on the abuse of nail salon workers, a $15 manicure felt like one of life's little pick-me-ups. But now it's fraught with worry that nail techs are being exploited and sickened by dangerous chemicals . Sarah Maslin Nir's two-part story had incredible…

r/fatpeoplehate is closed for business Reddit.com “We’re banning behavior, not ideas,” proclaimed Reddit’s most recent site policy change on Wednesday, one which purports to be a zero-tolerance edict against individual harassment, and led to the banning of five such subreddits — the most prominent…

By Greg Endries/Contour Getty Images. On the morning of June 30, 2012, the line of black Suburbans outside the Mandarin Oriental hotel, on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, was longer than usual. The drivers waited for their passengers: out-of-town guests heading to a wedding that was the capstone to the…

Anil says : “And it’s essential for Twitter to get out of the MAU [Monthly Active Users] metrics game with investors.” Preach it. These games with “metrics” that Wall Street loves so much remind me not of lessons about free-market economies, but the Soviet era. In the Soviet Gosplan , the…

An artist who dropped out of a top MFA program in protest is opening a ravishing solo show of maniacally detailed drawings this month in Chicago. Edie Fake, a transgender artist who left the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art along with all six of his classmates in protest last…

At its I/O developer conference last week Google announced a big revamp of its cloud-based photo sharing and storage product , uncoupling it from the Google+ social network, where usage was inevitably constrained, and sending it winging its way onto the wider web and iOS as a standalone app. Its…

Imagine that this is what you know about me: I am a college-educated male between the ages of 35 and 45. I own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 5, on which I browse the Internet via the Google Chrome browser. I tweet and blog publicly, where you can discover that I like chocolate and corgis. I’m married.…

Benny Johnson has become admired and loathed for his addictive brand of political Web journalism. “A hate click is just as valuable as a love click,” he says. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) Benny Johnson needed to escape the Internet. In less than two years, he had built himself up into a…

Haunted by her father’s death, Helen Macdonald kept company with a bird of prey. Credit Photograph by Christina McLeish / Courtesy Grove Atlantic The boys have gone out hawking. The year is 500 A.D., give or take, when young men of a certain social class fly hawks for sport. One of these boys…

It would have been crazy to say just a few years ago. But today, Google produces better-designed software than any other tech behemoth. If you don’t believe that, then set down your Apple-flavored Kool-Aid. Take a cleansing breath, open your mind, and compare Android and iOS. Start with push…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world. He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that…

The problem for women is that our role in popular music was codified long ago. Credit Illustration by Amanda Lanzone Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t own any albums by the Rolling Stones. They’re just so archetypal, so very rock and roll—and that, I find, can be a difficult thing to admire. Rock music…

[Photo Illustration: Joel Arbaje for Fast Company] If the story of the poop emoji’s rise were told in emojis, it would look like this: …which is to say, it is an international tale of drama, cultural differences, and near-disasters. This is that tale, told for the first time by the unsung heroes who…

Before TMZ, and even before the Internet, there was celebrity drama. But where was it? And who was involved? And how did people find out? Rembert Browne investigates. Dixie didn’t show up. You see, on the first go-around in 1989, Dixie was very much present. So present, in fact, she was Delta’s…

T he only thing more predictable than riots in the United States’ dilapidated cities is the outpouring of moralizing pseudo-explanations that accompany them. In this, as in so much else, Ferguson has been no exception. Between riffs on the venerable trope of “outside agitators,” commentators groping…

uber By Emily Guendelsberger Published: 05/07/2015 | Two good-looking young strangers are having an amazing conversation in the backseat of my car. I'm eavesdropping so hard I nearly run a red light. Her : Then don't make me sign it. Ugh, it's like you're planning for this not to work. Him…

Apple is synonymous with upper echelon design, but very little is known about the company's design process. Most of Apple's own employees aren't allowed inside Apple's fabled design studios. So we're left piecing together interviews , or outright speculating about how Apple does it and what it's…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Share this: Alicia Carr isn’t your typical tech founder. Having discovered her love for coding later in life, she’s using her newfound talent for a good cause. Her app, The Purple PocketBook , was established as an effort to empower women experiencing domestic violence with the essential tools…

YOU can tell a lot about people by looking at their music collections. Some have narrow tastes, mostly owning single genres like rap or heavy metal. Others are far more eclectic, their collections filled with hip-hop and jazz, country and classical, blues and rock. We often think of such differences…