The Sanquan factory in Zhengzhou, China, which produces frozen dumplings and frozen glutinous rice balls. Massimo Vitali for The New York Times ‘In Sichuan, we’re eaters,” said Chen Zemin, the world’s first and only frozen-dumpling billionaire. “We have an expression that goes, ‘Even if you have a…

Illustration by Tom Gauld It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when you could not play any song ever recorded, instantly, from your phone. I call this period adolescence. It lasted approximately 30 years, and it was galvanized by conflict. At that time, music had to be melted onto…

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

We adore celebrity correspondence and were tickled magenta last week when Broadway/ TV star Cheyenne Jackson sent us a link to "Calling All the Basic Bitches," the latest video by Internet sensation Lohanthony . There's not really much to the clip -- just a kid in a crazy outfit making a new…

Theo Padnos. Andrea Modica for The New York Times In the early morning hours of July 3, one of the two top commanders of Al Qaeda in Syria summoned me from my jail cell. For nearly two years, he had kept me locked in a series of prisons. That night, I was driven from a converted schoolroom outside…

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, stands atop a supply truck during a photo opportunity at a shopping mall in the southern Indian city of Bangalore in September. (Abhishek N. Chinnappa/Reuters) It seems like only yesterday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos enjoyed a heroic-genius coronation on 60…

Sam Manchester/The New York Times MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy. Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of…

Edward Mapplethorpe T here's something extremely unnerving about picking up the phone and hearing the voice at the other end say, in a Jersey accent, "This is Patti Smith." Smith is, after all, one of the coolest people in the entire world. William S. Burroughs described her as a shaman; this does…

A contractor at the Manila office of TaskUs, a firm that provides content moderation services to U.S. tech companies. Moises Saman/Magnum The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of…

Let us begin, as we so often do, by acknowledging that the term "basic bitch" has been expertly Columbused by white people. In 1984, the R&B group Klymaxx had a hit Billboard single with "Meeting In The Ladies Room," where one of the ladies sings about a basic woman who is trying to get up on her…

First of all, you probably mean "biased." Second of all, journalism isn't a term that means "stories you agree with." Third of all, fuck you. It seems like every so often the comments at Gizmodo fill up with entitled, half-witted thinkers, like a boil taut with ignorance. Even the least pointed…

Are you me? Maybe you are, and if you are me, you know there's no experience quite like it. Share if this sounds familiar, and you recognize that you're me! 1. You were born in Baltimore. Technically, you were gestated in Baltimore and the actual act of birth happened at a hospital outside the city…

Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, has made a new home for himself in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I used to look at this place from Manhattan, it was such a pity, it was mafia, a place where hit men dump bodies,” he said. Todd Heisler/The New York Times AT the Smorgasburg food fair…

The first Approval Matrix, published on Nov. 1, 2004 New York Magazine / Via New York Magazine If the last page of a magazine is supposed to be a good-bye, then New York Magazine ’s Approval Matrix is a smack and a kiss at the same time. After leading a renaissance at the New York Times Magazine in…

It’s been four years since Stewart Butterfield last sent an email to a work colleague. His team long ago replaced email with a chat app that plugged in to all their favorite services like Twitter, GitHub, and Dropbox. It worked so well that, when Butterfield’s game Glitch went under, his company…

Photo: Marvin Orellana/New York Magazine Not so long ago, Silicon Valley was filled with magic. For years after Steve Jobs described the original iPhone as a “revolutionary and magical product,” a rash of imitators jacked Jobs’s language to describe their own products. Social-media apps, big-data…

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Is it too late to nominate a candidate for novel of the summer? David Shafer’s first book, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” is a paranoid, sarcastic and clattering pop thriller that reads as if it were torn from the damp pages of Glenn Greenwald’s fever journal. It’s about…

Credit Photograph by Alex Majoli/Magnum. If Twitter is a place in which a user may be rewarded for exposing his most stupid self, Ira Glass put the medium to good use this week, when, after watching John Lithgow appear as King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he tweeted his response:…

Response to Bustle’s 31 Questions About Kim Kardashian Hollywood BONUS JULY INTERVIEW Normally I keep a very strict no-hatelinking policy on the internet. Life is too short, there is too much suffering, and a desire to foment hate and anger is exactly the reason people post terrible things on the…

Jemal Countess—Getty Images Martha Stewart attends the "Get On Up" premiere at The Apollo Theater on July 21, 2014 in New York City. Because it's a useful tool. And imagine what Louis XIV could have accomplished at Versailles if he'd had one There’s been a lot of discussion and a tremendous amount…

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

Google’s endeavors in typography are the subject of an article this week at New York Magazine ’s Web site called “ Google Is Designing the Font of the Future .” Writer Kevin Roose details the company’s recent history of crafting a proprietary typeface for its Android platform, starting with the…

Airbnb’s announcement of its new #branding struck the technical community on a lot of levels, not least of which are the many genitalia-related ways in which the logo can be interpreted. What I find most interesting in the new branding, however, is the way in which it articulates a logic of company…

Poster for one of a series of weekly film nights run by artist Wim Lambrecht at college Sint-Lucas Visual Arts Gent from 2007 to 2008. Designed by Raf Vancampenhoudt with Joris Van Aken Skewed, stretched type, clashing colours, too little or too much spacing – across Europe a new generation of…

Photo Credit Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times Lattes have a lot to answer for. To some, drinking one makes you a snob. To others, it makes you a spendthrift. But neither of these perceptions may be particularly accurate — and in fact, the latte can tell us a lot about how America thinks about…

Earlier this year, yogurt maker Chobani and its ad agency Droga5 launched a campaign, timed to run at the same time as the Super Bowl, emphasizing the “how” of food, specifically under the tag “how matters.” This seemingly innocuous campaign is suddenly causing some trouble for the country’s largest…

John Herrman Co-editor, The @Awl The Awl Be less stupid.

Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Credit Illustration by Brian Stauffer In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and…

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth. Except, of course, it doesn’t work out…

Back in 2012 many Americans were horrified to learn that their ground beef contained "pink slime." It's in our burgers! They're feeding it to our kids! The public outcry led many retailers to drop the beef additive from its products. But today, pink slime is slowly making its way back into our…

matt buchanan hello, sincerely The Awl Be less stupid.

matt buchanan hello, sincerely The Awl Be less stupid.

At Abington House, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan, 20 percent of the rents are much lower than the rest because of a city program. Bryan Thomas for The New York Times Abington House, at 500 West 30th Street near the High Line in West Chelsea, is a new luxury residential building and, like…

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Full audio, including audience Q&A, is at the bottom of this post. w.soundcloud.com Shani Hilton: I’ve seen completely random people reading your story out and about in New York City. People were reading it on the beach over Memorial Day…

How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to. You are, I’m afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to…