0 Shares Facebook Twitter Email A National Journal has earned the ire of progressive bloggers today with its story noting that the White House long ago figured out how to essentially incorporate liberal writers into the Obama communications shop. The article notes the access given to some of these…

Nick Knight Malibu, Calif. — From Shangri-la Studio here you can see the Pacific Ocean just over the fence lapping calmly at Zuma Beach. And this compound is just as Zen, with recording equipment set up in various locations, including an old bus and a spotless white house with all the mirrors…

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

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

BOY meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl marry, etc., etc., etc. Or. Boy (Girl) meets 25 girls (boys). Boy and girl perform falling in love in front of video cameras, producers and millions of television viewers. It is spring, the feverish time when people fall in love, when people…

Steve Brodner; The Media Issue by Post Typography In August 2013, just prior to her departure from NewsBeast, Brown began quietly planning her next act. She incorporated Women in the World Media, her own for-profit venture that would continue to stage the annual summit. She also registered Tina…

The main entrance to Wilson's British Library T he most haunting of all images for Colin St John Wilson, architect of many libraries, was that of Saint Jerome, the patron saint of scholars. In the well-known painting by Antonello da Messina, now in the National Gallery, the scholar-saint sits…

If these men only had TaskRabbit, they would never have joined the bread lines! Photo: FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images It’s not exactly news that in the absence of a solution to the unemployment crisis, Americans have learned to cobble together various odd jobs to replace the full-time,…

Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? Kate Losse ▪ March 26, 2013 www.katiecouric.com Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In isn’t the first social movement spearheaded by a Facebook executive. “Together we are starting a movement,” announced Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s 2007 F8 conference.…

The advance coverage of Silicon Valley , HBO ’s new Mike Judge-created send-up of the tech industry, more or less assumes that the real Silicon Valley should be running scared. Silicon Valley “mercilessly satirizes the excesses of a world it knows well ,” wrote the Huffington Post . The show “…

Photo: HBO At my first real job as a writer, I coped with my bratty, unprofessional bosses and co-workers by writing a cartoon about how bratty and unprofessional they were. My behavior itself was bratty and unprofessional, and at any other time and place, I would've been fired. But this was San…

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

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

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the…

Bitcoin market cap, from http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s an impressive achievement, for a purely virtual currency backed by no…

In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” Credit Construction by Ian Wright / Photograph by Ed Park Amazon is a global…

Bret Easton Ellis photographed at his home in LA by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete We know you're busy. You probably didn't have time to read every article we published on VICE.com this year. So we've compiled a list of some of our favorites and will be re-featuring them on the homepage through the end of…

Lately, it seems like the hardest content format to avoid on the social web is the BuzzFeed quiz. What city should I actually live in? Paris. How will I die? Eaten by piranhas. Should I learn to code? IDK, maybe? Which Al Roker am I? I’m Too old for Drake Al Roker. The quizzes, ranging from the…

One of the old but useful cliches about Steve Jobs-era Apple was that the company had a “reality distortion field.” What that meant was that through some combination of Jobs’s showmanship and journalists’ credulity, Apple could take a decent, well-designed product, and convince reporters to write…

Has there ever been a political reversal of fortune as rapid and as absolute as the one just experienced by Chris Christie? At warp speed, the governor of New Jersey has gone from the most popular politician in the country to the most embattled; from the Republicans’ brightest hope for 2016 to a man…

I am not ashamed to say that I have an abiding interest in popularity. Not my own so much — though I’m as eager to be liked as anyone — but popularity as a process and a phenomenon. Why are certain people, ideas, or stories popular at any given moment? Are there ways to make ideas or works of art…

This piece originally appeared on the Date Report . I recently tried to schedule a ladies’ night with three single friends, and it quickly became one of those endless email threads that looped and circled for weeks. Amy has voice lessons on Monday. Angela is ziplining on Saturday. Jen is headed to…

What's there left to say about Kanye West? Certainly, West himself would have plenty to say. After all, he's the guy who, during an NBC telethon to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, proclaimed, off script, that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." He's the guy who stormed the stage…

“It would be so interesting if we could stay like that,” Saunders said, meaning: if we could conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes with proximity to death. He described a flight from Chicago to Syracuse that he was on a little over 10 years ago. “We were flying along, and…

Why Go Out? I wonder why I am up here on this stage when I’d rather be at home, when being at home would be so much more comforting. And I wonder why all of you are sitting there in the audience, when so many of you would also be happier at home. At home, you can wear your pyjamas. No one is going…

corinnakirsch: Somewhat controversial economics article: "High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets in the world" http://t.co/DEPstuIfWK via @qz

I attended a small dinner party in 2005 when I was a student at Santa Clara University. Our special guest was Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse. Englebart died Wednesday. I asked Engelbart what he thought of Apple's first two-button mouse. Apple had just introduced its Mighty Mouse ,…

vpostrel: “@viverevivir: Disney may be the happiest place on Earth, but The Container Store is a close second.” It's Glamour http://t.co/qtHKfzL3vi

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected in 2003, despite having been banned from holding office, and since then he has taken an increasingly harsh line against his opponents. In the past five years, more than seven hundred people have been arrested. Credit Photograph by Abbas / Magnum Not long ago, at a…

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, 1984. Photo: Ron Galella/Getty A few weeks ago, in a televised symposium, Steven Spielberg predicted the “implosion” of Hollywood as a consequence of blockbuster mania while George Lucas sat next to him, nodding. “You’re at the point right now,” said Spielberg,…