From left, Andrew Dost, Nate Ruess and Jack Antonoff, who make up the band Fun., a name they spell with a period. Lindsey Byrnes Sometimes the road to a hit single starts with a drink to calm the nerves. A year ago Nate Ruess, the frontman of the pop-rock trio Fun. , was anxious about meeting Jeff…
Brian Sutorius
Download “Make Your Thing” Manifesto (PDF) Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success For the past two years or so, I’ve been crisscrossing the country, delivering an award-winning talk called Make Your Thing. (I should note that it has not won any…
Everyone who ever had a crush on Steve Martin developed an even bigger crush when he started writing for the New Yorker almost ten years ago. His first piece, a satire of middlebrow art world pretensions in which the narrator claims to own a birdbath sculpted by Raphael, reminded us of what we…
Pregame: How Are We Going to Play This? Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to…
Sam Calagione at Dogfish breweries. “I’m frustrated that one beer has been hammered down people’s throats,” he says. Credit Photographs By Martin Schoeller Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have…
What has 20 legs, 18 balls, and 1 brain? The State. David Lipsky joins the gang and tries to discover why last year’s hippest comedy troupe is this year’s most underemployed. Ben Garant is the group’s head writer. During pitches he jots notes, squirms in his chair, walks over desks. Garant’s main…
The band called fun. spells its name with a lowercase f and a period, and if they weren’t currently selling a boatload of records on account of a Glee appearance and a Chevy commercial , their questionable use of punctuation would probably be the thing you dislike about them most. But if Glee has…
In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a…
the pinnacle of evolution ( Attention conservation notice: Nothing said here is at all novel.) So Maciej Cegłowski has updated his blog for the first time in four months. Upon encountering the novel task of "actually generating HTML", his gimcrack blogging software sprayed a couple random posts…
Wow, you look so tired from working two jobs all day. Waitressing and working at Macy’s sure takes a toll, huh? I wish I could work a mind numbing, soul crushing 12 hour shift, but alas, I must resign myself to lying on your couch in a glassy eyed fugue state. The horror of torpor! My lifestyle is…
Pam Sutton holds a container of whiskey her husband made. She keeps it in the freezer. Shawn Poynter for The New York Times PARROTTSVILLE, Tenn. — This is a story about a man named Marvin Sutton and how he proved that the road from criminality to commodity is sometimes shorter than it looks. Until…
Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to…
Image by GapingVoidArt.com CNN has a story today full of outraged Twitter paper millionaires in a leaking-email-anonymous-commenting fit because they can't sell more than 20% of their Twitter stock. This is the ugly unintended consequence of the otherwise savvy use of secondary markets pioneered by…
T he NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences? By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries…
Collages by Sara Cwynar Mark Emmert, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association , the almighty overseer of American college sports, likes to think of himself as a reformer. A few months ago, after he’d been on the job for a little more than a year, he pushed through a series of…
JACK DORSEY, FOUNDER OF SQUARE AND INVENTOR OF TWITTER HEADQUARTERS San Francisco WEBSITE https://squareup.com TWITTER @square Mr. Jack Dorsey decided he would buy the coffee himself. We are at Sightglass, a San Francisco beanery and coffee shop owned by two brothers whose vintage roaster fills the…
With football season over, we asked the most important athlete of our age to try to make sense of the mystical experience that was Tebowmania. He said yes, on one condition: that we not alter a single word of his piece. For better or worse, we agreed. A s Yogi Berra famously said, “it’s like Deja Vu…
Our mission A curriculum vitae is a written overview of a person's experience and other qualifications. In some countries, a C.V. is typically the first item that a potential employer encounters regarding the job seeker and is typically used to screen applicants, often followed by an interview. The…
There’s a whole laundry list of disclaimers attached to it, but my pal (and Pulitzer winner) Matt Richtel wrote about a Stanford research report suggesting that spending considerable amounts of time on multimedia/technology can make us unhappy. In his words : “The answer, in the peer-reviewed study…
In his excellent book, The Master Switch , Tim Wu laid out a history of radio in the US that started with amateurs and techies experimenting with a new technology and finding ways to connect to each other with it. The story ended with radio as we know it today: a broadcast medium with its use as a…
Stop making to-do lists. They’re simply setting you up for failure and frustration. Consider the to-do lists you’re currently managing: how many items have been languishing since Michelle Bachman was leading the field for the Republican nomination? How often do you scan your list just so that you…
TV Some Like Her Hot It seemed crazy at first. Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe? Come on. We knew Williams could act—but could she make us drool? America, we have our answer. Meet the winner of GQ 's (okay, yes, unofficial) award for best actress Here is what happens in this article: I meet with…
It’s the episode we’ve not been waiting for; the remaining cast of Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off tackle the sinister and mysterious food truck craze, if you define a “craze” as just a “thing that has comfortably and unexcitedly just gone on existing for what seems like over half a decade now.”…
At Clemente’s storied shop, old-world charm and craftsmanship reign. Clemente the Barber The lost art of service can be found tucked away in a beautifully appointed barbershop in Ralph Lauren’s offices on Madison Avenue. The fact that its polished decor recalls a luxury ocean liner just serves to…
Part of the reason the tiresome LeBron James/Kobe Bryant debate lingers on is that they’ve never, ever played a meaningful game. All-Star antics and a handful of regular-season meetings aren’t enough to shift either party’s ideological platform. Kobe has five championship rings. LeBron is…
When I spoke at Swarthmore College recently, I was startled by one question: Is it immoral for students to seek banking jobs? The corollary question, with Mitt Romney’s business career under attack even by staunch Republicans, is this: Is it unethical to make millions in private equity? My answer to…
Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or…
As someone who watches Top Chef , a number of things have always troubled me about the format. One, almost none of the chefs were in the movie Young Guns . Two, many of them seem to have previous cooking experience, or at the very least to have eaten normal human food through their mouths. Three,…
After the 2005-2006 season of " Saturday Night Live ," five cast members -- Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Finesse Mitchell, Chris Parnell and Horatio Sanz -- left the show for assorted reasons. There were no additions to the cast for the 2006-2007 season. Current " Happy Endings " star Casey Wilson was…
Young the Giant, pictured here, made a tepid showing at the MTV Music Video Awards. Alex Shahmiri Every week since the end of May the band Sublime With Rome has had at least one song, sometimes two, on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart or its Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, often both. The most successful…
Only 7.3 percent of all television shows make it to a second season. I actually have no idea if that’s true, because I don’t know anything about successful television shows. The only shows I’ve worked on have been canceled. Two years ago, at a friend’s recommendation, I created a Twitter feed called…
The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a…
L ast April, Kevin Durant, of the Oklahoma City Thunder, held a playoff postgame press conference in a blue long-sleeved shirt with tiny screen-window checks. It had a spread collar and was buttoned up to his neck. Durant’s attire was noteworthy for several reasons, the first of which was that for…
OZZY
The Prince of Darkness Would Like a Little Peace
OZZY OSBOURNE CAN NO LONGER DRINK, SMOKE OR DO DRUGS. HIS OLD FRIENDS ARE ALL GONE, AND HIS KIDS ARE DRIVING HIM CRAZY. BUT AT LEAST HE'S STILL ALIVE.
Upstairs in his bedroom, trying to sleep, Ozzy Osbourne has just about had it with all the…
Editor's note: We’re debuting a new feature this week in which we dive into the archives to showcase some of the best stories from issues past. To kick things off, we revisit this tale of a man, a ball, a hoop, a bench (and an alleged thread)—how a small, but beautiful trick illuminates the mind of…
Dana Carvey, left, as the elder George Bush, a high point in caricatures, and Fred Armisen as President Obama. Left, Norman Ng/NBC; Dana Edelson/NBC When it comes to political satire, are you better off than you were four years ago? “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” remain sharp despite…
In 1964, Doubleday published "a terribly useful guide" called, terribly usefully, How to Be a New Yorker , by Joan and Leslie Rich. Joan was a Brooklyn-born native who ventured as far as Las Vegas before returning to the East Coast; Les was born and raised in Houston, where, after getting out of the…
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