F act: The Decision was the best thing that happened to the NBA in 15 years. Fact: The year leading up to The Decision spiked TV ratings, boosted Internet traffic, provoked an onslaught of media opinion and generated more mainstream interest than any NBA storyline since Kobe and Shaq had a year-long…

MIAMI -- There once was a man who enjoyed being the center of attention. He made a guest appearance on "Entourage." He nailed his two lines. The photo shoot he did for Maxim was, well, an attention grabber. With his 6-foot-11 frame sprawled out on expensive furniture in a posh beachfront home, he…

The World Science Festival this past week was another triumph of cultural cross-pollination, but I’m afraid there was one missed opportunity to bring art and science together. If only someone had thought to put Daniel Boulud and Nathan Myhrvold on the same stage, we could have considered the…

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew. But,…

Tom Gauld “The Hangover Part II” arrives much like a hangover — bludgeoning, harsh and relentless — yet it’s a notable, even groundbreaking film. It represents the logical evolution of a roughly five-year trend: someone has finally dared to make a mainstream American comedy in which nothing funny…

Life has three certainties: death, taxes and massively successful films getting a sequel. Therefore, it was no surprise that director Todd Phillips was asked to make The Hangover Part II. After all, 2009’s The Hangover not only reset the bar for gross-out comedy, but it was also a film that cost a…

I have a problem. I get anxious anytime I see a notification badge on my iPhone. Be it Mail, Reeder or something else, those little red circles really get under my skin. I check my email constantly, am always refreshing Twitter and love marking RSS feeds as read just to kill the little bastards. I —…

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt unless otherwise labeled] Anyone who moves around in burgercentric circles knows of the battle that's been brewing for the last few years between the three major heavyweights of the high-quality fast-food burger* world. Of the three, In-N-Out Burger , founded in…

When The Office premiered in March 2005 the national unemployment rate was 5.4%. GDP had grown for 14 consecutive quarters. The Dow was at 10,200 and climbing steadily (Staples had a price of about $22 a share). And yet, though the economy was relatively strong, job satisfaction had dropped to about…

Thrilling finishes have propelled the once-dominant Indians to baseball's best record. Mark Duncan/Associated Press CLEVELAND — Two flags hang from each lamppost on Ontario Street here, outside the home of the best team in baseball. On one side is a head shot of a smiling Cleveland Indians player.…

Any television show put on against American Idol has a hard row to hoe. Put it on mid-season, things get tougher. So maybe that was enough to doom Paul Reiser’s return to TV, no matter how good his show might have been. Reiser complains that NBC didn’t give the show a chance, giving him a bad time…

Raised in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan, writer/director/author Paul Feig channeled his awkward adolescent experiences into the NBC show Freaks And Geeks , which aired just 12 episodes in 1999-2000 before being cancelled. The show has since become a cult favorite, and launched the…

Michael Combs, second from left, and Dianne Vavra, with their children, Tom and Eve Combs, in their living room in Huntington, N.Y. Yana Paskova for The New York Times IT was a vision of family togetherness out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had worked in the era of WiFi. After a taco…

It’s amazing we are at a point where I will see half a dozen long form reviews of a two dollar application flood my RSS feed. Are we so desperate to save 1-5 dollars that we devote an hour to reading different perspectives on simple cheap apps? The web and the iOS app store have fueled the fire when…

Manny Ramirez, an 18-year-old from the Dominican Republic known for his fast swing and prodigious power, starred at George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1991. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Hero. Cheat. Prodigy. Ingrate. Free spirit. Knucklehead. Hall of Famer. Pariah. Enigma. Manny…

Rapper Snoop Dogg found a novel way to launch his new album this spring: with a star-studded release party in Hollywood that doubled as a showcase for a new fruit-flavored malt beverage called Blast. Conceived by the makers of Colt 45, Blast is the first serious competitor to Four Loko, the…

I recently had the worst comedic experience of my life. My college’s satirical newspaper, The Brown Noser , had been invited to the first “National Intercollegiate Humor Conference” at Princeton University. I was excited to write with my friends and meet funny people from other schools. The…

Growing up there was really only one bullet point on computers that I cared about: clock speed. I knew that the faster the CPU, the faster the computer. This drove my buying decisions (rather, my guidance of my parents buying decisions) for many years — this also lead the buying decisions of many…

version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? "Mr. Williams says that all successful businesspeople make enemies along the way." – The New York Times , October 30, 2010 How Twitter's owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different from how Twitter was actually founded. Mainly, the official version…

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes?…