A brief history of the NBA in eight fake quotes, five exclamation points and two question marks: 1946–56: “White guys, set shots, clotheslines and layups!” 1956–66: “Hi, I’m Bill, and this is Elgin, Wilt and Oscar.” 1967–76: “Things are going well, so let’s double the number of leagues, triple the…

For a few months a while back, it sure felt like the A.V. Club, where I was a staffer for about 16 years and remain a columnist today, was mentioned on The Best Show and Hollywood Handbook on a weekly basis, and never in a positive or non-mocking light. The website, and particularly its podcast…

Zarif Khan, a.k.a. Hot Tamale Louie, arrived in small-town Wyoming in 1909 and eventually became a local legend. Credit Illustration by Oliver Munday The first person in Sheridan, Wyoming, to learn that Hot Tamale Louie had been knifed to death was William Henry Harrison, Jr. The news came by…

Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of the Times , who writes a review every week—and who occasionally writes one that creates a national hubbub about class, money, and soup—was waiting for a table not long ago at Momofuku Nishi, a modish new restaurant in Chelsea. Wells is fifty-three and…

Desus Nice, left, and the Kid Mero on the set of their new late-night show on Viceland. An Rong Xu for The New York Times This past Tuesday afternoon, in a conference room on the third floor of Vice’s sprawling Williamsburg offices, the comic team of Desus & Mero was going through its daily…

Smith’s dynamic on-court talent has often been stymied by a reputation for impulsiveness. Credit Illustration by Rebecca Clarke J. R. Smith, who has played in…

The best routines, the worst shooters, the most clutch shots, and everything else you need to know Shea Serrano GIF After a long summer of topless championship parades, free-agency meetings in the Hamptons, Snapchat mishaps, and gold medals, the NBA is finally, truly, really, almost back. The start…

Celebrating the friendship of LeBron, D-Wade, Melo, and CP3 in five scenes, as told by the four themselves Getty Images/Ringer illustration After a long summer of topless championship parades, free-agency meetings in the Hamptons, Snapchat mishaps, and gold medals, the NBA is finally, truly, really,…

How Amber Rose, Blac Chyna, and Bubba Watson invaded your keyboard and became emoji moguls. And why brands are trying to do the same. John W. Tomac B efore

Late last week, I had a chance to sit down for an extensive phone conversation with the wonderful Sam Means. Back in January, Sam released his debut full-length

I thought that I had reached an age at which I could opt out of embarrassing myself in public, but last year, of my own free will, I did something mortifying. I took a series of eight improvisational-comedy classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which has, in the past two decades, developed into…

Can Millennials Take a Joke? Or is “offensive comedy” just outdated? Ringer GIF In the spring of 2005, a Washington State University theater major named

An Ode to the iPod Classic What the click wheel taught us about listening to music Getty Images/Ringer illustration “ W ow,” a man said to me recently on the

A Cleveland tech company is trying to change the way bourbon tastes — but is it change for the better or worse? Cleveland Whiskey Cleveland is demanding our

The Undeniables You can thank them for Giphy, Instapaper, and so much more Ringer illustration In the Internet Age, monoculture is unachievable. But there

H ey, kid, I see you’re out delivering newspapers. The Cleveland Press! I loved this paper. What’s the date, there? Its 1981, huh? Well, the Press won’t be around much longer; it shuts down in 1982. How do I know that? It’s complicated, kid. It’s complicated. Mind if I walk with you for a few…

THE RUNNING JOKE among Oklahoma City Thunder media is there are two Russell Westbrooks: the one who's wearing basketball shoes, and the one who isn't wearing basketball shoes. On the court, he's Russell Westbrook , the inferno of energy, anger and intensity. He's terse with reporters, unfriendly to…

From Blue Apron to Plated, the definitive ranking of meals delivered in boxes The most unsexy, onerous, absurdly challenging task I face on a daily basis is figuring out how to put food in my body. This isn’t college — grilled cheese every night isn’t fine. This isn’t elementary school — the…

Photo: Martin Schoeller With Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has found himself in the curious, and enviable, position of hosting a satirical news show that frequently makes news. Whether it’s by setting up a fake church to show the flimsiness of religious tax exemptions, urging viewers to overload…

At the Stonehouse Restaurant at the San Ysidro Ranch resort in Santa Barbara, CA, Heidi and Spencer Pratt are eating truffle fries and gluten-free bread and

Amy Nicole Schwartz is design director of Cards Against Humanity and Blackbox, a company that lets independent makers sell and ship packages on the cheap. She spoke to Doreen Lorenzo as part of Designing Women , a series of interviews with women in the design industry. Doreen Lorenzo: How did you…

Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist? A startup finds that asking for certain data improves the fit of its clothes — and lands the company in a cultural minefield. Illustration by Michael Marsicano In 2008, an entrepreneur named Seph Skerritt was frustrated with the way he shopped for clothes. Then a student…

The next time you call for a Lyft car and instead you get a DeLorean from Back to the Future , or a horde of hungry zombies, or a faceful of chicken feathers, you'll have one person to thank: Ethan Eyler, Lyft's resident merry prankster. While other Silicon Valley startups have recently abandoned…

Not too long ago, the word just came out of Justin Jackson’s mouth. It wasn’t a conscious choice to say what he said. He didn’t necessarily want to say it, either. And yet there it was, slipping out in casual conversation: “Dadgum.” “It kind of scared me at first, whenever I first used it,” Jackson,…

WIRED Logo The Silicon Valley Boys Aren’t Just Brilliant—They’re Part of a Comedy Revolution The games begin —as they so often do—with a poop joke. ¶ It’s a late-January morning and we’re on a giant back-lot soundstage in Los Angeles, where cast members of HBO’s dot-comedy Silicon Valley are hunched…

One cold February night in 2013, Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost ducked into a Brooklyn bar for a drink and some R&D. The two friends and designers, co-owners of a firm called Studio Neat, had both gotten into mixology recently. They were wondering what their in-home bars might be missing. Like so many…

Sorry Not Sorry Bryce Harper -- his play, his attitude, his hair! -- is on a mission to change baseball forever. ESPN The Magazine by Tim Keown PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HAPAK 03/10/16 T he swing is raging and primeval, a broken dam, a convulsion. It appears to have been engineered for a different time --…

Email Photo by Alex Boerner Tatiana Birgisson, founder of Durham's MATI T atiana Birgisson still gets excited about the prospectof free pizza. Sitting in her small square office in Durham, the twenty-six-year-old Duke graduate has recently returned from a luncheon hosted by American Underground, the…

IN the start-up world, failure is in. No sooner has an entrepreneur failed at a venture in Silicon Valley than he takes to the web — frequently to blogging

“I hate improv.” Hang around standup comedians enough and you will hear it. This may be confusing. Many don’t know there’s a difference between the comics with microphones and the ones who go mic-less, tagging in and out of scenes in a black box theatre. It’s understandable. After all, many people…

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

Jon Taffer Pej Behdarvand for The New York Times On your reality show ‘‘Bar Rescue,’’ you do speedy overhauls of failing bars. Do you ever worry that moving so

One of the greatest delights that modern bar culture affords us is the ability to sit down on a stool, pay a small fee, and touch a boob. No bouncer holds aside a velvet rope to let you in; no women swing around poles; the menu says nothing about lapdances; nobody, let's hope, is disrobing. You're…

The Carolina Panthers couldn’t be feeling luckier right now. They play with Cam Newton, the league’s likely MVP, on a team that will host the NFC title game on Sunday. Their defense is one of the best in the league, they went 15-1 during the regular season and they’re just one win from a Super Bowl.…

Halfway through breakfast at Café Luxembourg on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Bryant Gumbel unleashes a spot-on imitation of Will Smith in Concussion , specifically the Oscar-desperate earnestness dripping from the line that serves as a closer for the film’s TV spot: a close-up of Smith barking,…

Photographs by Mark Seliger Tired of looking like a harpooned whale every time he stepped onto the beach, Andrew Corsello set out to completely transform his body in just three months. would he become a ripped, waxed, bleached, oiled, preening, speedo-clad machine or keep getting sand kicked in his…

It was easy for Megan Phelps-Roper to tweet things that made people cringe—she knew that they were evil or deluded by God. Credit Photograph by Katy Grannan for The New Yorker On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red, their…

LOS ANGELES — From the moment Tina Fey and Amy Poehler walked into a studio green room here to the moment they entered a mind-melded comedy state, two and a

Photographs by Inez + Vinoodh The leader of the free world sits down with the free agent of the year—HBO’s Bill Simmons—to discuss the Obama era and beyond. The exclusive White House Q&A There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the…