The self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop star. O ne year ago this month, Lady Gaga arrived for an interview in the dark, oak-paneled lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, a massive Spanish-style place in the tourist district of Hollywood…
Brian Sutorius
The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord,…
It’s fall-TV season, which means a lot of new network dramas try to be like daring cable-TV dramas, and a lot of new sitcoms in which people in their 20s deliver punchlines about having either no sex or a lot of it. Of course, some of the new shows are better—and worse—than that. Here’s my guide,…
It’s fall-TV season, which means a lot of new network dramas try to be like daring cable-TV dramas, and a lot of new sitcoms in which people in their 20s deliver punchlines about having either no sex or a lot of it. Of course, some of the new shows are better—and worse—than that. Here’s my guide,…
1. The popular television sitcom 30 Rock premiered in the year 2006. Since that time, each man that I have dated has made a point of saying how much I remind him of the main character on that show, Liz Lemon. They said this, in each case, while we were breaking up. 2. The ways in which I have…
Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website In August 1995, HotWired, the online publishing division of Wired magazine, was just 10 months old, making it, by the accelerated pace of the early web, both a pioneer and a latecomer. Prior to the HotWired launch in October 1994, Wired…
“On the very day Toyota was making a high-profile defense of its cars, one of them was speeding out of control,” said CBS News–and a vast number of other media outlets worldwide. The driver of a 2008 Toyota Prius, James Sikes, called 911 to say his accelerator was stuck, he was zooming faster than…
I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad , and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each…
The cocktail is a lovely simple thing: a mixture of spirits and flavorings that whets the appetite, pleases the eye, and stimulates the mind. It is one of our conspicuous contributions to cultured living, up there with the Great American Songbook and the tuxedo. Yet, like almost everything else to…
A COMMON reason given by those who have yet to try Twitter : “I have nothing to say.” The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter. At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform,…
Excerpts from theSan Francisco Panorama
In January of 2010, McSweeney’s published the San Francisco Panorama, a Sunday-edition-sized newspaper. From time to time we will publish articles from its pages.
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Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From…
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FEATURE Shot Transitions and Narrative Logic in Hitchcock's Rope By Philippe Mather SHOT TRANSITIONS AND NARRATIVE LOGIC IN HITCHCOCK'S ROPE Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) belongs to a group of films including Lady in the Lake (1947, Robert Montgomery) which, in the history of classical Hollywood…
“Kill brass”: That’s the term for the spent cartridge of a sniper’s bullet. Russ Crane, seen here at a hotel in Egypt, where his unit was training, is a military sniper who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Photograph by Shawn Baldwin. I Outside of Austin, Texas, where the farming begins in…
Ethan Hill
Published in the March 2010 “Essentials” issue
For the 281st time in the last ten months, Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert’s been coming to it for nearly thirty…
Inside the singular hysteria of the Academy Awards race. Quentin Tarantino being interviewed before the Critics' Choice Awards, in L.A. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe) Portfolio by Brigitte Lacombe T he crowd inside Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater on January 9 is awaiting what is being billed as �An…
Last year, I spent two months recreating Your First Meteor Application , a video training series about building web applications with the Meteor JavaScript framework. This involved: Figuring what worked (and what didn’t) about the original version. Completely reworking every second of content from…
It’s fall-TV season, which means a lot of new network dramas try to be like daring cable-TV dramas, and a lot of new sitcoms in which people in their 20s deliver punchlines about having either no sex or a lot of it. Of course, some of the new shows are better—and worse—than that. Here’s my guide,…
Randy Mims, left, one of the Four Horsemen, is the first to exchange a handshake with LeBron James before games. David Ahntholz for The New York Times CLEVELAND — It is known simply as the Ritual. Thanks to the postgame highlights that show it, the posters that celebrate it, the shoe that is named…
I don't think we computer geeks appreciate how profoundly the rise of the smartphone, and Facebook, has changed the Internet audience. It's something that really only happened in the last five years , as smartphones and data plans dropped radically in price and became accessible – and addictive – to…
Jay and Dave together? Could it be true? It is, and there they were, Jay Leno and David Letterman sitting on a couch – with Oprah Winfrey between them — upstairs at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Mr. Letterman tapes his show. The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy…
January 29, 2010 7:44 PM 6:59:00 AM 35,000 Feet You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane? You’re 6 miles up.…
Caves are some of the last places on the planet left to explore. Though caving is relatively safe, if something goes wrong deep inside the Earth, a rescue can take days — in part because cell phones and walkie-talkies don’t work underground. But a remarkable teenager in New Mexico has invented a…
At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you’ll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things.…
FOR FROTH OR FERMENT At Little Branch, Cervantes Medina adds an egg to a Bermuda Sour. Photographs by Jeffrey Gurwin for The New York Times WHATEVER happened on the evening of Jan. 19 at the Pegu Club, the high-end cocktail hangout in Manhattan, the perpetrator was a specialty of the house: the Earl…
Happycentro Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.” In their quest for…
Never Dupe Your Readers I normally stay out of the fray when somebody in our industry does something stupid — because it happens so often — but what Jason Calacanis did to his readers on Twitter last night and this morning is as clear an example of pomposity and disrespect as you’ll ever find:…
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images You don't miss the game when the most charismatic athlete of his generation visits your city. Like everyone else at Staples Center, I had a little extra hop in my step Saturday night. LeBron was in the house. I skipped the second half of a live NFL playoff game…
Tumblr and Posterous are the two most prominent “tumblogging” sites, i.e. sites that make blogging more straightforward by making it easier to post media. Both were launched within six months. (Actually, Posterous was started later than Tumblr.) But now Tumblr has been an Alexa Top 100 site for a…
04.13. 2006 The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to…
Paul Drinkwater/NBC Conan O’Brien released a statement Tuesday saying that he no longer wanted to be the host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC if it appeared at 12:05 a.m. Mr. O’Brien’s brief run as host at 11:35 p.m. is to be cut short next month, as NBC decided to restore his predecessor, Jay Leno, to…
reddish plume of smoke against a black background
Simon Podgorsek/iStockPhoto
Originally published in the March 2008 issue
Five weeks ago, I was working the elliptical, my feet throbbing out those nasty loops. The entire machine panted its report, the morning mantra: down, down, down. Once I’d hit a…
Wingard and Barrett have a perfect eye and ear for this type of material. They have fun with their influences, paying homage to John Carpenter…
In his music, he routinely celebrates/deconstructs his public persona: brutalizer, coward, agnostic, and wannabe deity. “20,000 Days on Earth” is…
At NBC, a redefining moment After failed Leno experiment, 'Tonight Show' may never be the same By Gary Levin USA TODAY PASADENA, Calif. � TV's late shift is shifting again, and in a way that could retool a television institution, The Tonight Show . On Sunday, NBC confirmed what was Hollywood's…
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