O n West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, an overgrown tree obscures a whitewashed, two-story building sandwiched between a radio station and a studio lot. Inside, it's a time warp. The battered carpet

There are so, so many things crammed into this island. The Witness provides further evidence that video games are approaching the same degree of authorship as more traditional forms of media, in the s

There is no logic to it, but it happens with enough regularity to be memorable: A tragedy occurs, and days later, journalists report that if it wasn’t for a quirk of fate it might have taken another v

David Bowie has rarely embraced clear meaning, and on his new album, “Blackstar,” he’s as slippery as ever. Credit Photograph by Terry O'Neill / Getty David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” recently released, is his second album since he resurfaced from what seemed like semi-retirement. As it turned out, it was…

You find yourself in a hotel room in a strange city, like a character in the first scene of a videogame. Take a second to get oriented, to remember where fate has delivered you. Seattle. OK. You have

I remember telling a girl I dated in college once that I’d like to be dead by fifty. It was an egregiously stupid thing to say, the kind of low-risk rebellion a teenager from the suburbs engages in to seem dangerous and irreverent, like smoking a joint or shoplifting or wearing eyeliner (all of…

Escorts make $100 a hand job — but entrepreneurs like me? We make $5,000 a night. Welcome to the new economy of the oldest profession.By Svetlana ZPhotographs of Svetlana by Pascal PerichHis son didn’t get into Dartmouth and that makes him sad, because he loves his son and he knows how much pressure…

It’s the biggest day of your life... You’re on stage with the president... She gives you an award... Where did your pants go? On the one hand—super embarrassing. On the other hand—what a picture. Unfo

68 There’s a moment early on in The Order 1886 where you pick up an issue of the illustrated gazette from a derelict shack in Whitechapel. The cartoon it depicts is of an upstanding and mustachioed me

Back in 2010, ReadWrite wrote a small piece about Facebook's login, and this somehow made its way onto the first page of Google search results for 'Facebook login'. And it had hundreds of comments fro

“Oh my god,” yelps 27-year-old Claire Boucher, leaning forward in a fancy armchair in the corner of a London hotel room, gesticulating with stick-and-poked hands. She's telling me about one of her fav

Absurd, absurdist, and in its own elliptical way, one of the biggest influences on comedy today. Meet the unwitting pioneers behind the internet's dumbest revolution. Here are some attempts to describ

I couldn’t stop patting my weave. And that’s when it all made sense. Driving through Tennessee, finishing my fourth listen of Yeezus the afternoon it leaked, I realized I needed a break. I was floored

tl;dr There’s no such thing as Weird Twitter Will there be a mythology in the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code? And aft

One of the purest sources of weirdness on the internet. If you spend all day on the internet, you're probably keenly aware that YouTube is a wellspring of bizarre and often-brilliant user submitted vi

I feel like I should let you know what you’re in for. This is a long story about a juggler. It gets into some areas that matter in all sports, such as performance and audience and ambition, but there’

But what if we could build a commenting system that gives commenters a real sense of ownership? What if readers could manage their online identity and contributions across news sites under a single si

Hi, I’m Stephie, and I’m a recovering assistant-aholic. For the past five-plus years, I’ve had the incredible fortune of working for a whole slew of professional funny people. Many of my jobs were in film/TV production: as a personal assistant, production assistant, writer’s assistant, associate…

Paul Ford Jul 30, 2014 · 12 min read Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, in which a New Jersey

On first blush, it sounds boring. Worse, it’s a bit hard to explain because you haven’t used anything like it before. It’s a communications application, based on the system they created while building

You know the NFL’s current publicity crisis has entered the last stage of a credibility extinction when it starts consuming other empires. On Wednesday evening, ESPN announced that it is suspending its most popular columnist and star of his own cartoon Bill Simmons for three weeks for saying what…

André Benjamin is stressed."I am, I really am," he says. Benjamin -- André 3000 to the fans who idolize him as the visionary half of Outkast, Atlanta’s hugely influential, recently reunited hip-hop duo -- is sitting at a glass conference table at Milk Studios in Hollywood, rubbing his graying…

When we call Jeff Tweedy and Wilco “dad rock,” we’re speaking both literally — Tweedy’s new album Sukierae features his son Spencer on drums — and figuratively. The music of Wilco has long been the reigning sound of “maturity” in pop culture, soundtracking the moments when countless fictional…

Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines the idiom “pitch the fork” as “to tell a pitiful tale.” The term appeared printed in 1863 in Story of a Lancashire Thief: “Brummagem Joe, a cove [“fellow” or “dude,” if…

What Happens When a Comedian Eats His Vomit in Front of Lauren Conrad? Video This interview is dunzo! Comedian Eric Andre is known for his over-the-top, fake interviews on Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show. In a new interview with HuffPost Live, the Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 alum, 31,…

A contractor at the Manila office of TaskUs, a firm that provides content moderation services to U.S. tech companies. Moises Saman/Magnum The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of…

Illustrations by Matt Rota When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. I don’t believe this was a side of herself she shared with other people; she may have felt we had a…

Eric André has had a couple of relatively mainstream sitcom roles on Don’t Trust The B—— In Apartment 23 and 2 Broke Girls, but his true comedic sensibility is more fully displayed (along with, occasionally, his naked body) on The Eric André Show, which begins its third season tomorrow night,…

By Cord JeffersonIllustrations by Celine Loup For a few weeks one summer, when I was about eight or nine, my family and I road-tripped from our home in Tucson to the Grand Canyon and then up to Yosemite National Park. We hiked and played and slept for days amid some of the world’s most majestic…

One of the gifts of being young is that particular blend of self-confidence and self-consciousness. Jaden and Willow Smith have managed to turn this form of heady teenage introspection into expression instead of ennui. Willow, the 14-year-old musician whose debut single, “Whip My Hair,” went…

A Tumblr quote floated over to me about around the time of Trayvon Martin’s murder, from a Jonathan Lethem book that I’ve never read (The Fortress of Solitude). At this point, I don’t really need to read it, because it’s already asked me the most important question I’ve heard in a long time: “At…

RadioShack won’t be the only store to open on Thanksgiving Day, but it might be the only one of its particular makeup to do so. This isn’t Walmart or a call center, in which volunteers who want overtime pay can be chosen first. Most RadioShack stores have just a handful of employees, most or all of…

Mark Slutsky’s Sad YouTube project, which preserves moving comments found under song videos, is consistently powerful. It’s one of the rare internet media experiments that transcends gimmick to become art, which is why the continued attention it’s getting is gratifying but not necessarily…

When the history of the web is written, the final word will obviously belong to Reddit. What else will be left? And: what will we remember of a network of blogs called “Gawker Media”? Here is the collected wisdom on the topic of Gawker from Reddit over the years, in the words of Redditors…

The internet is a mountain, and if you climb that mountain, waiting for you at the top will be the person with whom you need to make peace. I climbed my mountain and a woman named Justine Sacco was there. One year ago today, Justine Sacco was the global head of communications for the digital media…

In the first chapter of his book, After Photography, digital photography theorist Fred Ritchin explains the central selling point of digital over analog: Put differently, the common perception is that digital files can’t decay. The grooves in a record are eventually worn down by the needle, while an…

Websites are unnecessary vestiges of a time before there were better ways to find things to look at on your computer or your phone. I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept…

Spend any time in the murkier bogs of the social internet — message boards, chans, far-right Eastern European political comment threads, Islam versus the International Zionist Conspiracy LiveJournals — and it won’t be long before you come across some version of this image: View this…

How two dads unwittingly became the foremost spokesmen for the online anime community Tyrone and Rog are arguing about anime again. “Tyrone, stop right here you Loli-loving autist, and bow to your senpai,” interjects a smirking Rog backed by music from Neon Genesis Evangelion. “My waifu Space Dandy…

In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else—has described himself as both “deeply, deeply…