This mystery where you solve a crime with a search engine is brilliantly made—but it has one big problem. You could argue that Google has ruined a lot of life's mysteries. In days gone by, we could debate endlessly in bars over what celebrity starred in which movie, or what the lyrics were to a…

Everything in the Music Industry Has Changed Except the Song Itself Is it time for a disruptor to change what songs look and sound like? O utside my songwriting classroom at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, the industry is in full disruption mode. This semester alone, publishers…

We're forever thankful to Silicon Valley for giving us the iPhone, omnipotent search engines, and swipe-simple hookups. But now that America's most vaunted industry has also become its most self-satisfied, Silicon Valley is veering toward fall-of-Rome territory. Which is why it needs to blow up…

When I arrive at the house in the Hollywood Hills that Chris Pratt shares with his wife, the comic actress Anna Faris, and their 2 1/2-year-old son, Jack, Pratt

"I had the idea that we should contact the Chia Pet company and talk them into making a 'Dave Chia,'" Photo: Gluekit The Lost Laughs of Letterman The departing host and his former writers share the greatest jokes he never told. Illustration by Gluekit My first day at Late Night With David Letterman,…

I n February, a news alert popped up on my phone from the New York Times . Such alerts often bring word of natural disasters and notable deaths. This one announced that Jon Stewart was stepping down from The Daily Show on Comedy Central with the kind of “this just in” declaration typically reserved…

Melissa McCarthy, her hands tied behind her back, writhed on the dingy basement floor of an abandoned power plant in Budapest — grunting, shrieking and, despite her best efforts, laughing. “Let me try that again,” she said, attempting a straight face. McCarthy was shooting Scene 114 in “Spy,” an…

THE FUTURE of the Toronto Blue Jays wakes up in a 1978 Volkswagen camper behind the dumpsters at a Wal-Mart and wonders if he has anything to eat. He rummages

This story comes from Lucky Peach #9: The Cooks & Chefs Issue . For more great stuff like this, subscribe to the magazine! A aron Franklin is a wood whisperer. He doesn’t have the multigenerational brisket-cooking lineage that his peers in the Hill Country do, but he has a savant-like aptitude for…

M ornings in the Haight in San Francisco, you’ll find all manner of bleary-eyed characters lined up outside the Pork Store Café hungry for the magic of the most underappreciated of American cuisiniers–the short-order breakfast cook. Our editor Chris Ying was one of them for many of his early years…

There is a certain vision of New York City as a playground of potential that exists only when you arrive, in your early 20s, from someplace smaller, be it Long

Yesterday, March 2nd, we released OneShot, an iOS app for highlighting and tweeting screenshots of text. I thought it would be fun to share a little bit about

W ill Forte greets me outside the bathroom, extending his hand as I zip up my fly. We are at the production offices of his new television show on the far northwest side of the San Fernando Valley, and I’ve shown up early for our interview. It’s still 12 minutes until we’re scheduled to speak, but…

The author skating in 1980. courtesy Kathy Sierra Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way, the WIRED headline began. Sure, I’ll go with that. It continued, Can

There was a lot to criticize about the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary celebration–Jerry Seinfeld’s #SorryNotSorry joshing around about “SNL’s” 40-year

Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Getty Stephen Colbert's reign as character-in-chief of The Colbert Report ends this week. To send him off, Vulture enlisted the help of celebrities, authors, journalists, actors, and other notables who have appeared on the show, or are just huge admirers, to recount…

“And that’s all you own? In that bag?”. “Yes”, I answered. It was for the third time that an inquisitive friend had asked the same question. I’d just arrived

This story first appeared in the Dec. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. I was probably 19 when I first came to Hollywood. Eddie Murphy brought me out

The last time Frank Rich had a conversation with Chris Rock was in early 1996, when they and the 1950s teen heartthrob Pat Boone were thrown together in a New

This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Nov. 24 The State of Football Issue. Subscribe today! AS THEY CAME over one of the last hills on Highway 6, the massive stadium appeared on the horizon. The silhouette of Kyle Field cut a chunk from the mid-October sky, and it was impossible to look at…

Over the years, people have battled and captured hundreds of Pokémon. And while everyone has their favorite, no pocket monster is as infamous as "Missingno." Let's take this opportunity to break down the many reasons why "Missingno" stands as one one of the coolest, most notorious glitches in…

Andrew Winning/Reuters The world's foremost street artist is a social justice warrior and a viral media master. She could be anyone. Banksy Does New York , a new documentary airing on HBO on Nov. 17, opens on a bunch of scofflaws trying to jack an inflatable word balloon reading "Banksy!" from the…

The following is an excerpt from the book The Brewer's Tale: A History of the World According to Beer , publishing October 13, 2014, from W.W. Norton. A tired farmhand trudges back from the fields, pushing through heavy curtains of grain to join his friends, lounging under a tree after a hard day's…

The GoPro short video is a post-literate diary, a stop on the way to a future in which everything will be filmed from every point of view. The pervasiveness of cameras, seemingly playful and benign, may be anything but. Credit Courtesy GoPro Late one fall afternoon two years ago, Aaron Chase, a…

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in the London Review of Books in 2003, titled “Using So Little.” This slightly edited and updated version is excerpted from Sean Wilsey’s new collection of essays, More Curious , out now from McSweeney’s. Personal Editor’s Note: This is my favorite essay…

TV Lost premiered 10 years ago this week. It ended four and a half years ago. And I still miss it like crazy. This doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion these

Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift, that goof from Magic!, and the limits of loving pop.

Yesterday, Death Cab for Cutie announced their first album in nearly four years and most people acted like they had broken up instead. This is because their return was bundled with the news that guitarist/producer Chris Walla was quitting after 17 years with the Washington band. And Walla…

H ow did Kevin Love become part of LeBron’s “I’m Coming Home” package to Cleveland even before that signing went down? LeBron passes 40,000 career minutes during the seventh minute of opening night in October, that’s how. The King doesn’t have time to wait for two Canadian kids to evolve into…

At its cafes, Blue Bottle might make one of the best iced-coffee drinks in America. But are artisan businesses doomed to fail when they try going mainstream?

Playing video games with LeBron James is so annoying. “When we were growing up we used to play this fighting game on the Sega Genesis called Shaq Fu,” says

In 2005, the House of Representatives passed an act that forbade consumers to sue fast-food operators over weight gain. “The Cheeseburger Bill” (formally, “The Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act”) attempted to legislate the message that the costs of fast food are personal, not social,…

The deskbound polemics of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” demonstrate focus and sustained thought. Eric Liebowitz/HBO At this point, we all have heard that print media is dying and that online journalism rests upon shaky business models. But at least fake news is thriving, right? Not so fast.…

Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed Like so many true romances, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller first committed to each other with an act of profound cheesiness. It was the summer of 1996, and Miller was interning at the visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic while living in what amounted to a…

I look back on the days I averaged only thirty thousand steps, and think, Honestly, how lazy can you get?

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2 considerably expands the world introduced in the first film, and that expansion includes a significant new presence: Valka, the long-lost mother of dragon-riding protagonist Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. The film devotes much of its sweet, sensitive middle…

Nathan Fielder (seated), in a tough spot in downtown Los Angeles. Jeff Minton for The New York Times The new cafe at 1802 Hillhurst Avenue looked familiar, but something was off. It was nestled into a strip mall in Los Feliz, on the east side of Los Angeles, and its logo was a double-tailed mermaid,…