Virgin Galactic is competing with startups like SpaceX and Blue Origin to be the first private company to send tourists into space—a mission that some experts have deemed irresponsibly risky. Unlike its rivals, Virgin Galactic does not use automated vehicles. Once a Virgin Galactic ship is airborne,…

Interesting ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Robin Sloan Date: Fri, Sep 11, 2018 at 3:13 AM Subject: Re: Gnomon J. Marlowe timeline? To: Sarah Burnes Dear Sarah: I am here to tell you the professional wrestler turned movie star Dwayne The Rock Johnson is going to be president, but…

N ew York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the

In June 2016, Antonio Perkins unintentionally broadcast his own death to the world. It was a sunny day in Chicago, and he was sharing it on Facebook Live, a platform for distributing video in real-time, released just a few months earlier. The video is long. It features Perkins doing mundane summer…

Juliette Toma Johnny Knoxville captured the Jackass ethos when he said, “There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity.” This line was uttered in the first

This Man Is an Island David Wolkowsky returned to his childhood home of Key West, Florida, in 1962, when he was in his 40s. Today, as he nears 100, he has long been known as Mr. Key West. Michael Adno tells us how the island we know today became a reflection of one man’s campy sense of style. Story…

The most hilarious, exhausting movie of the 21st century was, ironically, conceived as a cool-down. In the mid-2000s, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell were drained. The director and comedian, whose partnership dates back to their time on Saturday Night Live , had just finished Talladega Nights: The…

I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net . And the first thing I did when I logged on line, every single time, for years was…

After Game 3 of the NBA Finals, reporters surrounded Kevin Love in the Cavaliers’ locker room. ESPN’s Brian Windhorst stood at the group’s outer edge. This is an advantage of working for the Worldwide Leader; Windhorst can tap into the company’s boom mics and hear the interviews from afar. But on…

He worked so hard. So very hard. Drove a beat-up 1969 Valiant to work every day. Big hole in the floorboard. Glove compartment that popped open every time we

Remember Yanny vs. Laurel? It was some science thing that made people hear the same sound in two different ways, and everyone on the internet talked about it. In a sane world, there would be nothing else to discuss. But basically every news site covered the story — this Google News page that I…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration My first LeBron James experience came in December 2002, when his St. Vincent–St. Mary High School team played against Oak Hill Academy in Cleveland on ESPN2 . James had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a junior earlier that year, and I had a vague sense of…

Dressed in a punkish tattered T-shirt and green military jacket combo, surrounded in his Hollywood office by memorabilia from his movies (a droopy pair of prosthetic testicles among them), and with a gleam in his eye, Johnny Knoxville seems as rascally as ever. “There’s always going to be an…

Thirteen times in his NBA career, LeBron James has reached the postseason, and when the story of his career is told, it'll likely begin with the many memorable moments he has created during those 13 trips: eight NBA Finals appearances (including seven consecutive), three championships, three Finals…

Glover takes an ambivalent view of his widespread acclaim. “People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, Oh, he thinks he’s the golden flower of the black community, thinks he’s so different,” he said. “But I am, though!” Photographs by Awol Erizku for The New Yorker Audio:…

Hammon joined the San Antonio Spurs as an assistant coach in 2014. “I think she’s a star,” Gregg Popovich says. Photograph by Ben Lowy for The New Yorker Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. It was August, 2012, and Becky Hammon, the point…

Trevor Bauer's novel approach to baseball is manifested in word choices that typically don't appear in a major league clubhouse. Some pitchers find it mentally taxing to embrace the concept of "spin rate.'' Bauer is the only one who'll spend the offseason trying to pick up a slider and fretting…

On the morning of Friday, March 2, halfway through the first hour of ESPN Radio’s The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz , a story breaks that has significant implications for the Cleveland Cavaliers. “There are a number of things we want to talk about,” Le Batard says, somberly, “but everything stops,…

John Krasinski as Jim Halpert, Jenna Fischer as Pam Beesly, Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute. Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images 'The Dinner Party' was the most brilliantly excruciating episode of 'The Office.' John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, Ed Helms and more look back on its 10th anniversary…

“The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” a former Reddit C.E.O. wrote. These days, “the trolls are winning.” Illustration by Javier Jaén Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Which Web sites get the most traffic? According…

The east coast of South Florida feels like purgatory. There’s Miami, and there are beaches, but drive for 20 minutes outside of either, and it’s just vast plains of boxy, beige retirement villages, distinguishable only by their names, which all sound like euphemisms for a place you go when you die —…

On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack. It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were

Getty Images/Ringer illustration Hasan Minhaj is leaving Comedy Central. On Thursday, Netflix announced that he has signed on with the streaming service to host a weekly comedy show, with a 32-episode commitment, beginning later this year. For Minhaj, who will become the first Indian American to…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration Michael Jordan or LeBron James? It is one of the essential questions in the modern era of sports fandom, encompassing facts and biases, statistics and anecdotal evidence, and the ever-shifting barometer of cultural relevance. It turns friends into foes, barbershops…

What do audiences want from their late-night hosts? It’s a question that’s rarely posed directly, given that the medium’s importance is typically held as

Getty Images/Ringer Illustration About a week ago, the Cavaliers and the Hawks played. It was a regular game without much of anything of consequence happening, until it became extremely the opposite of that. What happened was: With about three and a half minutes left in the second quarter, Taurean…

The San Francisco–based accelerator IndieBio’s Demo Day is delightfully awkward. Scores of investors and journalists shuffle past nervous teams of founders into Herbst Theater, with its elegant chandeliers and grand old murals decorating the walls. Finally, with the room settled and the house lights…

Five decades of Hollywood glory have given us a pretty good idea of who Jeff Goldblum is on-screen. The actor is charismatic (Jurassic Park), surreal (The Fly),

Traffic moves along El Camino Real past a line of RVs in Palo Alto. James Hall AT QUITTING TIME on a weekday afternoon, a woman with a Stanford ID badge dangling from a lanyard arrives at her Palo Alto home—though it doesn’t seem like this particular home would be hers. “Karen,” who prefers that we…

Sep 27, 2017 For Mother's Day I asked for one thing: a house cleaning service. Bathrooms and floors specifically, windows if the extra expense was reasonable. The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I…

One day in the spring of 2016 I mentioned to a friend that I needed a new mattress. Mine was a sunken hand-me-down that had become about as comfortable as

LeBron James is an elder by basketball standards, yet still all but unstoppable. Photograph by Gregory Shamus / Getty Athletes these days share an understanding. Beneath the team rivalries,interpersonal scuffles, and slow-burning skirmishes for primacy sits aquiet acknowledgement of something like…

Ten days before Donald Trump took on Colin Kaepernick and the NFL and Stephen Curry and the NBA, and before LeBron James, one of the most famous and popular

In the fall of 1889, when he was 41 years old, the painter Paul Gauguin was brutally, furiously alone. Famous now for his saturated, almost hallucinatory…

With Lonzo taking top billing for sport’s glamour franchise, LeBron possibly on the way , and stars from virtually every team to be found on the streets and in SoulCycle classes, Los Angeles has become the mecca of the NBA offseason. In the second of four weeklong series leading up to the start of…

L ast summer, early in the morning, I stood out in the main square of Florence to watch the tourists come in. It was quiet. A Zamboni-like street cleaner drove

In December 2010, Sheryl Sandberg gave a talk about women’s leadership in which she mentioned “sitting at the table.” Women, she said, have to pull up a chair

One day in 2014, the video-game designer Zoë Quinn decided to make herself a cyborg . And so, this being the modern world, she simply ordered a kit from the internet that would allow her, via a large sterilized syringe that she plunged into the webbing between her left thumb and index finger, to…

We spoke to more than two dozen comedians who helped Scott Aukerman’s ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ podcast get to 500 episodes. It’s a hazy Saturday afternoon in July and some of the greatest improvisers in the country are assembling in a nondescript office building on Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood.…

Photographs by Randall Slavin This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Sept. 18 NFL Preview Issue. Subscribe today! After the game, Aaron Rodgers got on the bus. It was unusually cold in Arlington during the week leading up to Super Bowl XLV; a winter storm had barreled into Texas, blanketing…