For the last 61 days I've been traveling throughout California while living out of my Corolla, collecting stories from people living off the grid. The people I've met have abandoned the chase of the American Dream; they are not battling traffic to work a nine-to-five job in order to live in a big…

B eneath a yawning seven-metre-high Frank Gehry ceiling -- its outer shell covered by a 3.5-hectare Mark Zuckerberg-devised giant rooftop park; its pristine 40,000-square-metre interior decorated with posters imploring staff to "Move Fast And Break Things" and "Think Wrong" - David Marcus, a former…

Audrey Elaine Elrod was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived…

YOU know that uneasy feeling you get when someone is looming over you? I have it right now, multiplied by four. Only the hoverers aren’t doggedly trying to get my attention; they couldn’t care less. They’re beavering away behind standing desks. In my department alone, four people have installed…

If you’ve ever found yourself buying clothes just because they’re cheap, or if shopping itself has become a form of entertainment for you, I’ve got a proposal: The next time you buy something, spend a whole lot on it. Enough that it makes you sweat a little. The point is to make you pause and ask…

TGD Traveler : The perfect travel-sized version of our beloved large format magazine—small and light enough to take anywhere—packed with the same inspiring content our readers love. Buy Now Tell us about your path to becoming a musician. My path was weird and unconventional. I got my first proper…

How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale In the ‘90s, Aby Ngana Diop was the queen of taasu, a practice of ritual poetry performed by female griots in Senegal. Diop’s distinctive vocals made her a sought-after performer at the weddings and funerals of the rich and…

Photo: Godong/Getty Images Two years ago, I broke up with my boyfriend and, one month later, became a sex columnist. Since then I have been dating nonstop in every conceivable manner. I have used 15 dating apps personally and half a dozen others on behalf of friends and acquaintances. (I’m either…

It all happened so quickly, about a year ago today. One minute, hardly anyone had heard of the ad-free social network Ello. The next, it was a viral sensation, spawning countless think pieces on its chances for survival. Then, as quickly as it appeared, Ello faded from the spotlight. Now, only a…

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were…

In a post-email world, where our inboxes have turned into cesspools of responsibility, the Internet newsletter–against all odds–has made a comeback. From projects like Listserve and Miranda July’s We Think Alone to more personal curations like Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs and Alexis Madrigal’s 5…

Vimeo About Vimeo Vimeo Blog Vimeo Guidelines Partners Students Developers Jobs Help Help Center Video School More On Demand Upload Features Site Map Upgrade Vimeo Plus Vimeo PRO Vimeo Business Vimeo Live Vimeo OTT Refer a friend Did you know? You can upload videos to Vimeo directly from Dropbox!…

Unlike many tech startups, Kickstarter was making money by its second year of operation. By some rough estimates, it might be worth half a billion dollars now. But the company isn’t planning to sell. And now they’ve legally committed to a mission bigger than making money. On September 21,…

IT has been a bad decade for God, at least so far. Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. Searches questioning God’s existence…

On a bright, windy October morning in 2014, Ellen Page prepared to film a wrenching scene for her upcoming movie Freeheld , a project she’d been attached to since 2008. The four-minute scene was six years in the making for Page: Her character, Stacie Andree, was alone on a beach — Long Island's Lido…

In 2013, I traveled to Alaska to give a talk to a group of local reporters. The conference organizers had asked me to speak about how journalists can create a “personal brand,” and tantalized by a subsidized vacation in the Alaskan wilderness, I quickly agreed. On the flight to Anchorage, I perused…

Lena Dunham, right, interviews Hillary Clinton for the first official edition of Lenny Letter, her eponymous newsletter project. Lenny Letter is doing something exceptional — but also exceptionally old-fashioned. The feminist arts newsletter, created by “Girls” star Lena Dunham and her writing…

F or many years, Julia Wise wondered if she would ever meet another person who thought as she did. Everyone she knew thought her ideas about morality were strange. Some people told her they thought she might be right, but they were not willing to make the sacrifices she made; other people thought…

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with…

zinetv/Flickr It’s a simple question, and you’ve probably answered it hundreds of times. “What do you do?” If you’re like most people, you probably get the answer dead wrong. Your standard reply is probably a factual description of your current job. The right answer is: what you WANT to do. The best…

Experts once predicted that Americans would face an excess of leisure time. PHOTOGRAPH BY OLI SCARFF/GETTY Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon. It revealed a workplace where abrupt firings are common, grown men and women cry at…

by Joe Berkowitz and Hallie Bateman Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of…

Image via the Brotherhood of Fire Facebook page Steve Buscemi, the veteran actor with the one-in-a-million face, known for his depictions of weirdos and gangsters, inspires a lot of creative description: The Guardian referred to him as a “strangely attractive shoelace” and one critic recalled…

Hilde Lysiak Hilde Lysiak hopped on her bike and pedaled south past the old Selinsgrove Inn, past the farmers market with the Amish couple selling home-grown veggies and pies, past the local police station where no one was around to answer the door, and over the green truss bridge above Penns Creek…

thefixer via Flickr For decades, De Beers has been the preeminent name in diamonds. Thanks to a stockpile of the world's rough diamond supply, indelible marketing schemes and even negotiations with foreign governments for their diamonds, De Beers — owned by the Oppenheimer family since the 1920s —…

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Will Shortz tests his own limits of committment, and his brains ability to be fully activated. "Playing ping pong everyday is sort of like solving a crossword puzzle: the further you take it, the better you feel" -Will Shortz, Editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle and Table Tennis Fanatic.

(Image via Etsy ) It’s the most important day of your life. Why wouldn’t you hire a “social media artist” to live-tweet your wedding? By Alana Levinson T he problem with the #CornStew hashtag is it’s not unique. Even worse, it’s littered with pictures of corn stew, quite possibly the most unromantic…

OUR best selves are merely one doodle away. Where once drawing and other painterly pursuits were the province of starving artists or simply child’s play, unlocking one’s creativity has become the latest mantra of personal growth and career success. We nurture our inner Helmut Newtons on Instagram.…

At a design conference recently, I was introduced to Leeo , a new product that I initially understood to be a reboot of something really in need of a redesign: the smoke detector. As the designer explained his process, I quickly came to understand that Leeo was nothing of the sort. It was a gadget,…

I NEVER went to Iceland. I suppose I should say I didn’t go to Iceland this summer — never sounds a little melodramatic, possibly terminal. It’s not as if I’ve died and all hope of ever having gone to Iceland is obviated. But for some reason this missed opportunity is causing me more than the usual,…

Twitter contains multitudes. You’ve probably heard of Black Twitter , Weird Twitter , and Social Justice Twitter. There are hundreds of loose communities like these, each with their own esoteric humor, dialect, and participants—their “collective personality,” for lack of a more specific term. But…

What kind of music do you listen to? Your answer is probably something like, "Oh, a little bit of everything." Or maybe, "Anything but country and metal." (And polka. Everybody hates polka.) The honest truth is, you probably don't know. You just like good stuff, and leave it at that. If you use…

EVERYONE knows that texting and tweeting are ruining the kids’ writing. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Or are they? Getting things into 140 characters might be teaching young writers one of the most cherished virtues among those who deal…

The Colors Of An App Icon I wrote an eBook called “Secrets of the App Store”, get it free ! At Appbot we get to see a lot of app icons while providing insights into app reviews. In the past I have studied everything from app descriptions , to screenshots , to names , to countries . The one that has…

Speech given by David Foster Wallace to Kenyon College's 2005 graduating class.

Interviews by Jon Pareles Produced by Wilson Andrews, Alicia DeSantis, Taige Jensen, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas and Graham Roberts Photography Alex Di Suvero Directory of Photography (Diplo) Kai Regan Directory of Photography (Justin Bieber and Skrillex) Nikita Carpenter Jr. and Sean Biffar Camera…

Allow the pearl-clutching to commence—or continue. Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by Thinkstock. In 1860s Manhattan, young men and women in search of some excitement could duck into a little stationery shop uptown, open the unmarked notebook on the counter, and scribble a message to…

The Science Of Love In The 21st Century Eve Fairbanks Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call love. The first stage is called "limerence." This is the spine-tingling,…

Suicide is a very rare phenomenon at the far end of human anguish. And yet its existence tells us something crucial about how fragile we all are: it's a further reminder of the need for compassion. If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): https://goo.gl/qUbSPj If you are…