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…

If you ever get a chance to tour Akron, Ohio , with Savannah and LeBron James, they might show you the tree-lined street Savannah grew up on with her parents, and the low-income housing where LeBron lived with his mom. Probably they’ll point out St. Vincent–St. Mary, LeBron’s high school, where a…

GQ Style: I've been curious about smoking weed, I guess... Especially when people talk about it helping with creativity. Aziz Ansari: To me, the argument for drugs is that you live your life with this one perspective all the time. Why not just see what it's like from a different perspective? To be…

In her new film Landline, Jenny Slate plays Dana Jacobs, a woman who finds herself drawn to a man ( played by hunky Finn Wittrock ) while in a relationship with a different man (played by brainy—though also hunky, just in a different way, you know!— Jay Duplass ). At the same time, Dana and her…

Welcome to Inefficiency Week . Over the next five days, we’re going to take a look at what we lose when we get lost in the chase for efficiency. We’ll explore the ways it’s changing the games we love to watch. We’ll remember its failures across the pop culture spectrum. And we’ll report on what it’s…

Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture A few weeks after the release of Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble,” the hard-charging lead single on his fourth album Damn. , the song landed at No. 1 on Billboard ’s streaming chart. It’s been on the chart ever since, never falling below No. 3 as users have played it…

Ownership and independence is everything. Our family’s movement is about letting other parents and prospects know, “Hey, you don’t have to feel pressured into thinking that there aren’t many options. There’s a different route that you can take in this.” All we want to do is plant the seed and watch…

(Columbia Pictures/Ringer illustration) Growing up in Lompoc, California, a mostly rural town north of Santa Barbara, Kelly Candaele was vaguely aware that his mother, Helen Callaghan, and his aunt Marge had played professional baseball back in the day. His mom still had her old glove, and would…

I ’m sitting by the fireplace, as I told him I would be. This is in a café near the Mission District in San Francisco. I spot him straightaway because he looks so jumpy. He’s never talked to a journalist before. We give each other surreptitious nods. He sits down. He’s nice-looking, in his early…

I was 10 weeks pregnant when my sister called to tell me thatmy dad had unexpectedly died of a heart attack. At that moment, everything about my dadwhirled through my mind all at once—the crinkle of his eyes when he laughed, theswagger of his walk, the intonation of his voice when he called me…

THE CAVALIERS' GROUP TEXT chain is aptly named BORED. Channing Frye's nimble mind requires constant stimulation, so he instituted BORED shortly after he joined Cleveland in February 2016, contacting the entire roster and encouraging all of his new teammates to share random thoughts. Last week's…

Breaking Into the Booth Some of the brightest minds in NBA media are often kept on the sideline, but figures like Doris Burke and Rosalyn Gold-Onwude are

When I walk into the Chappaqua dining room in which Hillary Clinton is spending her days working on her new book, I am greeted by a vision from the past. Wearing no makeup and giant Coke-bottle glasses, dressed in a gray mock-turtleneck and black zip sweatshirt, Hillary looks less Clinton and more…

A s LeBron James embarks on his ninth Eastern Conference finals since 2007, we look back at a pair of his most legendary road contests. This, the first of a

In her sublime new Netflix standup special, Old Baby , premiering today, Maria Bamford performs a comedy set in increasingly larger venues. What begins as a few jokes in front of a mirror progresses to a living room, onto a bowling alley, and so on, until she goes out with a bang on a big stage. The…

A s we took a seat in the back of the Commissary, a restaurant on the Sony Pictures Studios lot, Mike Judge pointed out a man seated two booths away. It was Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures and former head of Fox’s film division, where he oversaw the rocky release of Judge’s 2006 film,…

The Chainsmokers Are Legit Now, and Also Boring On the first — really! — album from the bad boys of EDM (Getty Images/Ringer illustration) To the extent that

Funny or Die at 10, an Oral History of a Comedy Juggernaut When Funny or Die launched on April 12, 2007, with “The Landlord” —a supercheap two-minute sketch pitting Will Ferrell against a swearing toddler—the premise was so simple even a 2-year-old could understand it: A user submitted a homemade…

The legend has been passed down by NBA generations, chronicled like a Homeric odyssey. The tale they tell is of Kevin Garnett and the 2007-08 Celtics, and the seminal moment of a revolution. Bryan Doo, Celtics strength and conditioning coach, recalls it as if it were yesterday, how before a game in…

C hristopher Knight was only 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for

Impossible Foods has created something extraordinary: a vegan burger catered to the most voracious of carnivores. It is the next chapter in America’s proud and disgraceful history with the burger, our most important cultural export. It promises to do a lot of good — but is it any good? (Xenia Latii)…

Share Share Getty Images / Jim Smeal /BEI / Shutterstock / BuzzFeed Last January Kanye West called Taylor Swift to ask whether she’d mind if he wrote a song in which he referenced having sex with her. After hearing the lyrics, she told him that they “didn’t matter” to her. But she had an idea. “If…

Every episode of Billy on the Street is a window on a social experiment unfolding on the streets of New York. How would New Yorkers react if a tall white man with a microphone breathlessly ran up to them to ask about the cancellation of Bones ? They are startled, they try to ignore him, others are…