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…
Brian Sutorius
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…
Default The Hangover Part III It started as a challenge. A patently absurd challenge. Could one writer keep up with a real-life Wolf Pack—comic star Aziz Ansari, top chef David Chang, and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy—as the hipster trinity partied through Tokyo, arguably the food capital of the…
She stoops to conquer: Whitney Cummings and Chris D’Elia as a battling couple on NBC’s “Whitney.” Credit Illustration by Jorge Arévalo Whitney Cummings may be this year’s most unnerving success, having launched two network sitcoms, an unheard-of achievement for a newcomer. On “Whitney,” which airs…
The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook. I also did not write a proposal for the nonfiction book I imagined, which was about quitting Facebook. In the book, I would indulge the conceit that my Facebook friends are,…
It's a glorious thing, hearing Eddie Murphy say "fuck" again. Few people ever said it better – and down here in the basement of the stone-and-marble mansion he built on a Beverly Hills cliff, it's coming from his lips often enough to make Shrek blush. "Come on, motherfucker," Murphy shouts, over the…
An old-fashioned Andrey Novikov/Thinkstock. One cold morning many years ago, a grouchy old New Yorker cranked out a letter to the editor of the Times . Happens every day, I know, but listen: This was New Year's Day in 1936, and this old timer—that's how he signed the letter, "Old Timer"—unraveled a…
If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for…
Save to Instapaper California has wine. New Orleans has bourbon. The South has the mint julep. New York—New York, I submit, has a problem. Its problem sauntered into a trendy downtown bar in highlighted curls and lowlighted roots and an inexplicable pink tutu in 1998 and didn’t leave until 2004 and…
After a brief, failed experiment paying me to do chores, my dad tried something really neat. It clearly took a bit of legwork, but maybe there are some transferrable lessons for parents who want to lay an entrepreneurial foundation. He gave me a vending machine. He rented the machine, found a…
Imagine living your life with no clock. No more dragging yourself out of bed when it’s still dark out. No more fighting through miles of traffic, everyone around you bound to the same schedule, stuffing muffins in their faces, spilling coffee on their laps, texting with one hand, driving with no…
THE ARCHIVE
February 15, 2010 Annals of Anthropology
How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it.
1.
In 1956, Dwight Heath, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, was preparing to do field work for his dissertation. He was interested in land reform and social change,…
They have become the standard violator appearing on advertising; in the corner of print ads, across billboards, on buses, or in pieces of direct mail — even peppered throughout this article. You’ve seen them; that little block of even littler squares. Unfortunately the technology behind QR codes was…
For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage. Or as Adah Siganoff put it, “rage, panic, fear, terror and anger, all mixed…
Collections The Most Innovative Companies The top 50 companies in entertainment, media, sports, technology, and more. Most Creative People Meet this year's inspiring leaders. Innovation By Design A showcase for ingenious design solutions. World Changing Ideas New workplaces, new food sources, new…
Last weekend was a good one for Chris Joseph. The Miami Dolphins , the team he has rooted for since he was a child and about whom he runs a blog called Fins Nation , had a bye. Joseph was freed. Not from despair that the Dolphins might lose. But from the fear that they might win and ruin everything.…
It is supposed to drip twice, on cue, from the bottom right-hand corner of a forkful of tortellini — first as the fork is lifted above the plate and, second, after the fork pauses briefly in the air and starts to rise again. Two drips. A sequence that lasts a second and a half, tops. A dozen men at…
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I use Evernote as an all-purpose notebook for storing random ideas. Several readers mentioned that it was the first time they had ever heard of it, and wondered what other tools I was using. So, in the spirit of The Setup , I thought I’d give a breakdown of my daily…
It’s impossible to imagine the web as it is today without Steve Jobs in the story. Even something as seemingly simple as proportional width fonts might not exist were it not for Jobs and Apple, to say nothing of the WebKit project and dozens of other contributions. Through it all Jobs and Apple…
CLIFF’S AMUSEMENT PARK, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO, JUNE Albuquerque is hot and bright and infested with moths. Gary Hays, owner of Cliff’s Amusement Park, the only amusement park in New Mexico, tells me the moths return every five or so years. No, Hays doesn’t know where they come from; no, he’s not…
“I ’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.” Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on…
Stanley Hainsworth has been a catalyst for the great brands of modern times. He was creative director at Nike and then Lego. He was vice president global creative at Starbucks in an era when the coffee purveyor was experiencing phenomenal growth. Starbucks has been hailed, acknowledged, and praised…
In August 1994, on the occasion of the magazine's 40 th anniversary, Sports Illustrated ran a 22,000-word story called "How We Got Here." Steve Rushin's sprawling, multipart essay on integration, the rise of television, and the encroachment of corporate interests was the kind of story that the…
This American Life’s piece on flopping in the NBA, and the story fans tell themselves about its origins. It’s one act in an excellent episode about crybabies, which you can hear in its entirety here . Ira Glass : Sports, of course, is a place where there are some of the biggest crybabies. And in…
By Brad Stone
(Corrects to magazine version.)
Jeff Bezos is channeling Steve Jobs. It’s mid-September and the wiry billionaire founder of Amazon.com is at his brand-new corporate headquarters in Seattle, in a building named Day One South after his conviction that 17-year-old Amazon is still in its…
Glossary of Abbreviations How-to Guides to Website Design Good Web Design - Critical for Your Online Success Good website design doesn't come cheap. Exactly the opposite, it is quite an investment if you want it done right from the start. Website Design and Presentation of Services The Internet is…
“Gentleman, we are about to eat like fucking kings. Well…kings of a very specific food group,” says Jesse Thorn, public radio host and Internet style guru, as we cross a busy stretch of 7th Street in Los Angeles’ Westlake district. Our destination is Langer’s Deli, a Jewish eatery famous for its…
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