I f you’re truly listening, you already know that today’s music is every bit as magnificent and horrible as it ever was. But read enough contemporary music criticism and you might buy in to a more flattering hallucination. Now, when a pop star reaches a certain strata of fame — and we’re talking…

“Meet the inventor who plans to live forever,” ran the headline of last Sunday’s “ Breakfast With the ​FT ” column, in which Ray Kurzweil, who invented the flatbed scanner and the first text-to-speech systems, invited the Financial Times’s Caroline Daniel to breakfast in his San Francisco apartment.…

Before Nyan Cat , before “Imma let you finish,” even before rickrolling , there was a small startup in New York dedicated to finding pre-viral content online. The first employees of BuzzFeed wrote about Borat, MySpace, and the “highly anticipated” Nintendo Wii. That was 2006—nine years ago on the…

Jason Stopa, “Diamond Spectrum (Taste The Rainbow)” (2014), oil and enamel on canvas, 3 x 3 ft. (all images courtesy the artist) Jason Stopa stands a head taller than most of us and shares some strong ideas about contemporary art with a calm, intellectual confidence. His work, too, is raw, but the…

Twitter’s blog is generally a cheery place, with one big exception from 2012: the innocuously named Changes Coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API , and in particular, the section called “Changes to the Developer Rules of the Road” that attempted to put the kibosh on 3rd-party Twitter clients: 1…

Francesca Amfitheatrof, Tiffany’s design director, in the company’s showroom with her mood board pinned on the back wall. Christopher Sturman/Trunk Archive Back in February at the Academy Awards, the Australian actress Cate Blanchett made her usual regal turn on the red carpet, a vision of cool…

O n April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America , wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been a normal, if handsome, 25-year-old trying to make it in public relations. Then on March 31, he was photographed amid…

As the 2016 presidential election draws closer, America's political press corps is warming up for what they do best: drone on about nothing of consequence. Advocates of press freedom are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson when he said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government…

Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely , a writer for Rolling Stone , telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on…

Photo A Vitamin Shoppe store in Brooklyn. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times Popular weight-loss and workout supplements on sale in hundreds of vitamin shops across the nation contain a chemical nearly identical to amphetamine, the powerful stimulant, and pose dangers to the health of those…

Monk’s Lode, a man-made waterway going through Wicken Fen. Helen Macdonald for The New York Times On a foggy morning last spring, I took my brother and 11-year-old niece for a long walk in one of Britain’s oldest nature reserves, Wicken Fen, a tiny fragment of a lost marshland ecosystem that once…

I needed a vacation from my adult life — from myself, really. I tried new jobs, no job, exercise, meditation, sex, food. Then I tried “molly.” By Mary H.K. Choi Photographs by Elizabeth Renstrom and Alex Thebez It’s 6:30 and I’m waiting in a dive bar with a mug of hot tea. Peppermint. It’s 20…

Thomas Barwick via Getty Images (Dedicated to my sweetheart.) My oldest daughter, Jenna, recently said to me, "My greatest fear as a child was that you and mom would get divorced. Then, when I was twelve, I decided that you fought so much that maybe it would be better if you did." Then she added…

Nilesyan / Getty Images Early this year, I went to the basement of the admissions office at Yale University and sat down in front of a thin manila folder. It contained my own confidential admissions documents: my high school years distilled into numerical rankings, and notes from admissions officers…

Natalie Andrewson A few months ago, I moderated a televised book-fair panel, an event I approached with a certain amount of trepidation, but that providentially went well. An overflowing audience laughed and clapped in the right places. The panelists thanked me after. I felt great. Two weeks later,…

Note: This full book will soon be available. Sign up here to get the entire contents. Table of Contents Introduction Instagram Press Twitter Introduction We’re going to let you in on a little secret: Most marketing and growth hacking books are bullshit. They’re full of fluff and marketing-speak and…

M.I.A . spent the early-Aughts as a creative hybrid — a graphic designer, photographer, videographer and hipster fashionista living in London. When her friend Justine Frischmann, the onetime singer of Elastica, loaned her a Roland MC-505, she began writing clever tracks that mashed globally-aware…

Before he quit as the administrator of 4chan, Christopher Poole received "a lot of e-mails of a threatening nature" from users, he says. Sean McCabe A t 11 a.m. on January 21st, Christopher Poole posted a note online saying he was retiring as the administrator of 4chan, the notorious website he had…

William Gibson Interview: His Buzz Rickson Line, Tech Wear, and the Limits of Authenticity Mar 5, 2015 | by William Gibson and his novel Neuromancer burst into the cultural consciousness in 1984. The book was in the first wave of cyberpunk and established ideas of cyberspace, artificial…

In theory, combining one good thing with another good thing can yield an exponentially greater thing. But for every delicious turducken, functional democratic republic, and aesthetically pleasing Supreme x North Face down jacket, there is a bottle of shampoo/conditioner that leaves your hair greasy,…

W hen the great granddaddy of opinion journals, The New Republic , abruptly vanished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and management theory last winter, establishment journalists rent their garments and gnashed their teeth in horror. “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable…

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS : Rebecca, here’s why I wanted to write this with you: I had a moment on Facebook when I realized that almost everyone I know (and love) loves Broad City , and I hate it. You and I are feminists and professors and women of color — differently situated in all of those categories…

How to “Get into Tech” If You’re Not an Obvious Fit Everyone wants in on tech, not just engineers. Here’s how to “break in”—and stay in

Like a great many such things, some of journalism’s most precious ideals were the happy result of geography and economics. That is, in any given geography, the dominant newspaper tended towards a natural monopoly for two reasons: When it came to costs, the ownership of expensive printing presses and…

Image credit: istock by Jeremy Hill This year marks the 80th anniversary of the invention of nylon . As ubiquitous a material it may be nowadays, you may be unaware of how revolutionary nylon was when it first hit the market, or the tragic story behind its creator. Science and Discovery In the mid…

William Powell, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook , in 1971 © JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis O n September 10, 1976, during an evening flight from New York to Chicago, a bearded passenger handed a sealed envelope to an attendant. The note began: “One, this plane is hijacked.” In the rest of the letter,…

Christelle Enault WOMEN are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathic to our children’s needs and intuitive of our partners’ intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring. Some research suggests that women are often better at…

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

The Pawtucket Red Sox, left, and the Syracuse Chiefs at McCoy Stadium in 1996. Ed Nessen/Associated Press The icy reminder of a baseball truth has blown down from New England, down from a Rhode Island city forever described as gritty, or struggling, or, more politely, challenged. No doubt you have…

Things have been hard since I got let go from TIME. Me and Kenyatta have been scrambling to hold everything together. Relationship is good — we've been in this situation before, so we're not as panicked as before. Samori is doing well — for all he knows I just have more time to spend with him, which…

Facebook / Via facebook.com “I am a pro-vaccine doctor. I am also a pro-information doctor.” So says Robert Sears in his preface to The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child , a best-seller billed on Amazon.com as a “fair, impartial, fact-based resource.” The average reader might…

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

Photo Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times This is a story that involves lots of public intrigue, a futuristic wearable technology, a secret laboratory, fashion models, sky divers and an interoffice love triangle that ended a billionaire’s marriage. This is the story of Google Glass.…