OLYMPIA, Wash. — Especially around Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for “date nights” and romantic dinners for two. But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it’s equally important to cultivate the skills of…

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine there is a long profile of a new kind of pedagogy unique to our particular stage of civilization. It’s called “porn literacy,” and it involves explaining to young people…

Video Premiere: Nervus “The Way Back” ~ words by tom johnson In the same way that it can be fleeting, fun, and fanciful music also has the ability to be powerful and provocative, and while music that aims for those latter sentiments can often come across as trite or untrue, there are moments, too,…

B eneath the bland veneer of supermarket automation lurks an ugly truth: There’s a lot of shoplifting going on in the self-scanning checkout lane. But don’t call it shoplifting. The guys in loss prevention prefer “external shrinkage.” Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo…

WASHINGTON — As part of a monthlong challenge to declutter her digital life, Kristi Kremers vowed she would cut off her online addictions: Instagram, Facebook and the news websites she checks hourly. Her resolve dissolved within days. She checked the Drudge Report, “a one-stop shop,” she admitted,…

D rew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.” A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone. The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also…

Matthew the Horse Job Title Illustrator, Poet, Lecturer Based Leeds Selected Clients The Guardian , New York Times , The Economist , Converse, Crabbies Ginger Beer, Nature Magazine , National History Museum, Nobrow Books Previous Employment Graphic Designer, Copywriter, Greengrocer, Agricultural…

Photograph: bee32/Getty Images/iStockphoto I t’s not what you say, it’s how you say it – isn’t it? According to language analysts, we may have this wrong. ‘‘We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realise,” says Elizabeth Stokoe , professor of social interaction at Loughborough…

Media playback is unsupported on your device Tattoos can be frowned upon in Asian culture but tattoo artist Heleena Mistry explains how she’s using her Indian-inspired designs to challenge the taboo. She has more than twenty tattoos. Filmed and edited by Nalini Sivathasan, BBC Asian Network 07 Feb…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks to reporters during a media event at Facebook’s Headquarters office in Menlo Park, California. Photo: AFP/AFP/Getty Images Last month, in its second round of layoffs in as many years, comedy hub Funny or Die reportedly eliminated its entire editorial team…

DIGITAL DISTRACTION Your smartphone📱is making you👈 stupid, antisocial 🙅 and unhealthy 😷. So why can't you put it down❔⁉️ A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific…

Grizzly Bear has been a band for over 15 years now and you just released Painted Ruins , your 5th record. Is it funny to look back and try to trace the evolution of your work? Yes, certainly if you go far enough back. I can start uncovering things I did when I was a teenager that are just…

Pretend you are the lead detective on a hit new show, “CSI: Terrible Stuff on the Internet.” In the first episode, you set up one of those crazy walls plastered with headlines and headshots, looking for hidden connections between everything awful that’s been happening online recently. There’s a lot…

It’s an early evening in January, and David Harbour is already in his pajamas, lying on a mattress without sheets in a country club just outside of Los Angeles. Moments before, he had been jumping on the bed like a giddy teenager at a slumber party. He turns to his side, looks over his shoulder and,…

Part of a grassroots project called the Refill initiative, the stickers were first used in the city of Bristol in 2015. Two months later, 200 businesses had signed up, and the idea quickly spread to other parts of the country and international cities like Hamburg and Berlin . Around 1,600 “refill…

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To cash in on the growing anxiety that we are fast becoming a bunch of Wi-Fi-enabled cyborgs, the marketplace has spawned a new consumer category: products to free you from the crushing grip of always-on digital ubiquity. There are digital detox retreats : off-grid playgrounds where the habitually…

LONDON — When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the internet, there was a practical — as well as compulsive — reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines. “If you’re interviewing David Bowie , you don’t want to be like, ‘O.K., mate, what’s your…

Most people are products of their time. Only the rare few are its creators. Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) was one. A fierce thinker and largehearted, beautiful writer who considered writing an act of falling in love , Le Guin left behind a vast, varied body of work and…

One million plastic bottles are sold around the world each minute . Most are used for bottled water, and most end up in the trash. As demand for bottled water grows–particularly in China–so does the bottle problem. By 2021, humans will use an estimated half a trillion bottles plastic bottles a year.…

Not long ago a friend told me how she had come to end her relationship with WeWork , the entrepreneurial-class fun house that at recent count had been rolled out in 59 cities around the world. A playwright and producer, she had been renting office space at a WeWork location in Brooklyn when one…

When did finding something to put in your coffee get so complicated? For the lactose-intolerant or merely dairy-averse, there are more alternatives to good ol’ American cow’s milk than ever. First there were powdered “creamers,” with their troublesome corn syrup solids. Then came soy, which may come…

Alexey Boldin / Shutterstock / The Atlantic The defining feature of conversation is the expectation of a response. It would just be a monologue without one. In person, or on the phone, those responses come astoundingly quickly: After one person has spoken, the other replies in an average of just 200…

On “The End of the F***ing World,” intimacy doesn’t need to be healthy to be genuine. Illustration by Adrian Tomine The first person we meet on “The End of the F***ing World,” on Netflix, is James, a dour, pie-faced seventeen-year-old who is “pretty sure” he’s a psychopath. At nine, James tells us…

An open note to Google To the gmail team, You've built a tool for a billion people. Most of my blog readers use it every day, and so do I. Thanks for creating an effective way for people to connect to the people and ideas they care about. That comes with responsibility. The same responsibility that…

Ikon Images / Alamy Stock Photo The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with "takes" arguing…

Photo illustration by Adam Ferriss By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE , GABRIEL J.X. DANCE , RICHARD HARRIS and MARK HANSEN T he real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses…

Zuckerberg photographed at the Samsung Electronics Co. Unpacked event in 2016. By Pau Barrena/Bloomberg/Getty Images. Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg , the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one,…

Something has changed inside Apple Retail stores. On a recent trip to my local Apple Store on a Sunday afternoon, it was actually difficult to get up close to the Apple Watch tables. People were looking at and buying various Apple Watch models and bands. It brought back memories of the early hoopla…

It’s a strange thing to realise and accept your mortality at 26 years young. It’s just one of those things you ignore. The days tick by and you just expect they will keep on coming; Until the unexpected happens. I always imagined myself growing old, wrinkled and grey- most likely caused by the…

Double Vision: Behind the Popular Trend of Releasing Two Singles at Once

If It’s Important, Learn It Repeatedly

You collaborate with a lot of people, often over a long period of time. How do you find a good collaborator, and what do you think makes a good collaboration? There’s a different story with every collaborator. It’s really like friendships. Each friend you have or each person that’s in your life,…

SAN FRANCISCO — I’ve gone gray, and it’s great. In an effort to break my smartphone addiction, I’ve joined a small group of people turning their phone screens to grayscale — cutting out the colors and going with a range of shades from white to black. First popularized by the tech ethicist Tristan…

At 10pm last Thursday night, Jonny Gould took to the stage in the ballroom at London’s Dorchester Hotel. “Welcome to the most un-PC event of the year,” he roared. Mr Gould — who presented Channel 5’s Major League Baseball show — was there to host a charity auction, the centrepiece of a secretive…

Great strides: Shannon and Cheriece Hylton have been tipped by Andy Murray as Britain’s brightest sprinting stars.Photograph: The Observer W hen the Hylton sisters were teenagers – they are now 21 – they were netball ninjas, terrorising the courts of southeast London. “It was our second favourite…

A year ago, before the investor lawsuits and the federal investigations, before the mass resignations, and before the connotation of the word “Uber” shifted from “world’s most valuable startup” to “world’s most dysfunctional,” Uber’s executives sat around a hotel conference room table in San…

1. Somebody, somewhere does something bad. Tom Phillips / BuzzFeed / Getty Images 2. Somebody spots the bad thing. Tom Phillips / BuzzFeed / Getty Images 3. People quickly pick up on the bad thing. Tom Phillips / BuzzFeed / Getty Images 4. Tweets about the bad thing start to go viral. Tom Phillips /…