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 Or is “offensive comedy” just outdated?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…

Haley Potiker is still getting the glitter out of her couch cushions. “I know I cannot work with Dr. Luke. I physically cannot. I don’t feel safe in any way.” — Kesha, in her latest affidavit All Kesha wants to do is leave her contract. This September, the singer born Kesha Rose Sebert was forced to…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "Mark is fixing stuff." I’m killing time in the Frank Gehry–designed Building 20, whose signature feature is its soaring 434,000 square feet of open space, the latest addition to Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California . A PR handler is explaining why CEO Mark…

Photographs by Ian Allen What's next from the chef known for flavors so bold it feels like someone's filming a slasher flick in your gut? Why, $75-a-bottle red wine, of course! But Guy Fieri isn't planting grapes just because he digs "bomb-ass Pinot." (His words, not ours.) He's after something much…

“What’s Bill Simmons like? A lot of people have asked me that question since 2011, and it’s understandable—if I knew somebody who worked with him, I’d ask the same thing. But I don’t have a great answer, and people are usually disappointed to learn that I’ve never met him in person or even talked to…

(Illustration by Dan Evans ) How hard do you think The Rock could punch me? Obviously: to death. I feel The Rock could punch me on most of the parts of my body and I would immediately die. Would I die if The Rock punched me in the head? Yes, I would die. Would I die if The Rock punched me somewhere…

Christine and her husband Robert Robinson over breakfast in their Mission Hills, Kan., home. Ms. Robinson often can’t tolerate the sound of her husband’s chewing. Photo: Ryan NIcholson Photography for The Wall Street Journal Christine Robinson was looking forward to a date night with her husband,…

It began just five years ago, with a photo of a dog and his girlfriend’s foot. Now Instagram has outstripped Twitter, with 400 million users. But is there life beyond selfies and sunsets?

He sees in the pizza not just a meal, but a piece of himself. And for that reason alone he must have it, consume it, be one with it. Only then will he achieve his true identity, the one he was destined for: The Pizza Rat.

Billy Eichner, of Funny or Die’s “Billy on the Street,” during a visit to the Museum of Sex. He is also starring on the Hulu sitcom “Difficult People,” with Julie Klausner. Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times “This is like a terrible ‘ Sex and the City ’ episode,” said the comedian Billy Eichner,…