It is a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town in France. Two men meet at a cafe. One of them, Berenger, is half-drunk. He is being berated by his companion, Jean. All of the sudden, they hear a great noise. When they and other townspeople crane their necks to figure out what’s going on, they see a…

On this day four years ago, Barack Obama had just scored a comfortable electoral vote victory (332 to 206) over Mitt Romney. Reflecting on what felt like a slightly bonkers election cycle at the time, I put on my speculative hat as a futurist and penned a list of the 10 things that might get even…

By Vera Anderson/WireImage. Sorkin Girls, Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the…

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world. Source Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad,…

Valerie Aurora runs a San Francisco-based firm that holds training sessions on how to end workplace sexism. ‘It is the exact opposite of Lean In.’Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer I t’s a Friday afternoon at a tech startup in downtown San Francisco, and Valerie Aurora is arming men with…

Chelsea Beck “Apocalypse” seems like a bit much. I thought that last fall when Vanity Fair titled Nancy Jo Sales’s article on dating apps “ Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse ’” and I thought it again this month when Hinge, another dating app, advertised its relaunch with a site called…

Sherry Zheng was cleaning up from dinner, ready to toss out the remaining fried rice, when she grabbed her phone from the counter to text her husband, Chris. He was upstairs bathing their three children. “Should I save you the leftovers?” Her phone vibrated: “Sure.” Ms. Zheng, a 37-year-old…

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Michelle McNamara, a 46-year-old true-crime writer, died chasing a serial killer. The Golden State Killer , a name she coined while working on a book about him, raped and murdered dozens of victims in the 1970s and ’80s and remains at large. After years of investigative…

Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times By Why does David Letterman have a beard? To put it more precisely: Why did Mr. Letterman, after stepping down from CBS’s “Late Show” and a 33-year career in late-night television and all but disappearing from public life, spend the past year and a half…

Earlier this month, Patagonia announced the arrival of its new vice president of marketing Cory Bayers. A longtime Lululemon brand vet–most recently serving as its VP of global brand creative–and one-time global marketing manager at Helly Hansen, Bayers has worked with active and outdoor brands for…

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — A couple of years ago, Walmart, which once built its entire branding around a big yellow smiley face, was creating more than its share of frowns. Shoppers were fed up. They complained of dirty bathrooms, empty shelves, endless checkout lines and impossible-to-find employees. Only…

For record labels, technological change has created more questions than answers. Are they even relevant anymore? Which tech trends and tools matter for their bottom line, and which ones are just "hype"? Should labels' historical roles stay the same in the wake of disruption, or should these roles…

I n the age of online dating there are more romantic options than there are fish in the, well, you know. On the appropriately named site Plenty of Fish, for instance, you can pore over profiles of hundreds or thousands of potential mates before deciding which ones to contact. Such unfettered choice…

Adult life is full of commitments: bills to pay, family to see and a job you probably have to show up for. But in a world where many of us complain of being overscheduled, there’s something uniquely depressing about having no control over the time once quaintly called “personal” and “free.” A recent…

Chance the Rapper performing in New York. Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for vitaminwater Chance the Rapper is the most talented rapper of his generation and a pioneer in the music industry. His latest album, "Coloring Book," released in May, is one of the best-reviewed albums of the year and…

How We Need to Keep Growing Up The business of growing up is something we normally think comes to a close when we get to 16 or so – and finally turn into those fully finished products: adults. Up until then, our growth is the subject of quite a lot of collective fascination. Twentieth-century…

“There’s always someone worse off than yourself.” Whenever I hear that, I wonder who stands at the end of the chain of misfortune, the person whose life is worst of all. In a parish where I once worked, I met him. He was a young man whom I’ll call Dean, with schizophrenia, a condition so…

Animation by Slate . Photo by Thinkstock. On Slate ’s watch, professional writing has changed out of cocktail attire into sweatpants—or, more precisely, it’s embraced the freedom to wear evening gowns, clubwear, athleisure, business casual, or nothing at all. That doesn’t mean the subjects being…

Half an hour late, and just ahead of his minder—he was always a step ahead of his ponderous old minder—Abraham Chabon sauntered into the room where the designer Virgil Abloh was giving a private preview of Off-White's collection for spring-summer 2017 to a small group of reporters, editorial…

On Feeling Depressed We’re not talking about the extreme, most paralysing, regions of despair – where external medical help is vital. Our target is rather the times when we feel – as indicated by Henry David Thoreau’s phrase – mired in moods of ‘quiet desperation’: a large, grey hinterland in which…

Design + Mental Health And how the design industry can tackle mental health Words by Emily Gosling Published on September 12th, 2016 Creativity and Depression, illustration by George Douglas Notions of the “tortured artist” are well-worn: who can forget Van Gogh’s severed ear; poor Sylvia Plath’s…

The Age of the Instagram Eyebrow Image credit: Darren Garrett You can probably tell a woman’s generation by the thickness of her eyebrows. I was a teen in the 90s, when a uniformly tweezed, slender arch was the norm—and when you pluck that much you just aren’t going to get it back. Now my natural…

After years of posting indiscriminately to social media, I was suddenly faced with uncomfortable questions about what will happen to all of it when I die. BuzzFeed News A few weeks ago, I went to my own funeral. Or at least a simulation of my own funeral. I was sitting in an auditorium, alone except…

Why We Go Cold on Our Partners The story of the path to coldness in love is well known. We start off full of affection for one another and then – with time – feelings fade. We start prioritising work; we check our phones while they’re speaking; we don’t especially want to hear how their day went.…

The Third Transportation Revolution Lyft’s Vision for the Next Ten Years and Beyond Introduction: A Country Built for Cars I remember when I first fell in love with cars. It started small with Hot Wheels when I was three and Micromachines when I was six. Everything about them was fast and exciting —…

Vulfpeck with special guests Joey Dosik Bernard Purdie Richie Rodriguez Melissa Gardiner Rachael Price Eddie Barbash Michael Winograd Cory Wong Louis Cato Ibanda Ruhumbika Tomek Miernowski

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little…

Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK) There are few more shameful confessions to make than that we are lonely. The basic assumption is that no respectable person could ever feel isolated – unless they had just moved country or been widowed. Yet in truth, a high degree of loneliness is an…

Yvon Chouinard showing Crow children how to fish in Montana. He has frequently disappeared for months, sometimes for half the year, to fish, climb, kayak, surf, ski—and preserve—the planet’s untamed precincts. Photograph by John Francis Peters for The New Yorker When Yvon Chouinard, the climber and…

Here’s why… For the next two weeks, a Tube station in South London will create a rip in the space time continuum. The C itizens A dvertising T akeover S ervice has replaced 68 adverts in Clapham Common with pictures of cats. This isn’t a clever marketing stunt for a pet food brand, or a guerrilla…

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes,…

The anniversary of Roald Dahl’s birth is marked by a new volume of the writer’s correspondence with his mother. PHOTOGRAPH BY RONALD DUMONT / DAILY EXPRESS / HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY Roald Dahl, the British children’s-book author behind such inventions as an auntie-squashing peach and the mercurial…

A few days ago I caused a stir in my own tiny corner of the internet world by saying what I thought everybody already knew: If you support Trump, you are a White Supremacist. When people talked about Hillary going too far when she said half of Trump’s supporters can be put into a “ basket of…

Bleary-eyed at three in the morning, I submitted the personal essay I’d spent months crafting. When I woke up, an email was awaiting me with the subject THIS ESSAY IS EVERYTHING ! “Ur writing is srsly #OnFleek!” wrote the editor. “I need 2 tweak a little and then we can publish it on the site.…

The consequences of monetizing your bliss Edness Wilkens, a secretary at the U.S. Mint in Washington D.C., was also an avid coin collector in 1938. (Harris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress) My great aunt loved to press flowers. She lived in the Northeast corner of California — the part nobody…

ONE puzzle of the world is that religions often don’t resemble their founders. Jesus never mentioned gays or abortion but focused on the sick and the poor, yet some Christian leaders have prospered by demonizing gays. Muhammad raised the status of women in his time, yet today some Islamic clerics…

When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots or post his own, nor…

Rodrigo Benavides At 5am, after a night of drinking with strangers, and pool, and fireworks in the street, and crappy pizza I was sitting in the living room with two friends. One had a serious girlfriend, and one — like me — had been single for a long time. “Being single is really hard,” I said. My…