Look, Google, we’ve got a plan to help you win on social. There’s only one catch: You have to give up on the notion that animates Google Plus.
Out in the Mojave Desert, there’s a place called California City that’s fascinated me ever since Geoff Manaugh brought its story to the Internet’s attention.…
Brian Sutorius
This whole We Hate LeBron thing reminds me of a story. A woman is in front of an apartment house that's engulfed in flames. She's screaming, "Help! Help! My baby's in there!" A man sprints up and says, "Which floor?" "Tenth!" she screams. "In the back!" He rips off his coat and goes running in. Five…
Here’s the story Adam Fleischman likes to tell about the genesis of his Umami restaurant empire: Hunched over a ketchup-red plastic cafe-teria tray at the Culver City In-N-Out Burger, Fleischman, a 35-year-old wine entrepreneur, peers into a cardboard box flecked with french fry grease. He ponders…
How a young entrepreneur got caught living secretly at AOL CNET's Kara Tsuboi talks to Dan Terdiman about how he broke the story about the famous AOL squatter. by Kara Tsuboi Close Drag It was 6 a.m. when Eric Simons was jolted awake by the yelling. After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old…
Talking with Del Harvey of Twitter at pii2012 this morning. Del Harvey is the director of trust and safety for Twitter — a big job that covers areas including account activity and abuse, user safety, spam, legal issues and many other areas. This morning at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference,…
One of my favorite things about this time of year are the commencement addresses delivered to graduating students at colleges and universities across that country that pop up on YouTube. I enjoy watching/listening/reading these speeches because I think they’re often filled with wisdom and…
Top stories Getty Images Texas Bound Edwin Encarnacion hit a walk-off HR in the 11th inning to launch the Blue Jays over the Orioles and into the ALDS where they'll face the Rangers. 6:36 Scan All: Citizen Soldier 400 at Dover After a hectic weekend, NASCAR America gives you all access to the…
Topics: Consumerism
The grand unifying theory of the American consumer has been that we are, first and foremost, low price fetishists. There’s ample evidence supporting this view: From Wal-Mart’s prominence to the fast food industry’s ongoing success, vast swaths of the economy are indeed built on…
With the Between Two Ferns: A Fairytale of New York debuting Sunday at 8:30 before the Comedy Awards , I thought it was a perfect time to look back at the Between Two Ferns series. B2F has been incredibly popular, bringing in over 80 million views across the entire series, on Funny or Die alone.…
8:00AM BST 27 Apr 2012 The fastest man on earth is lying motionless on the spongy blue running track at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He appears to be asleep. The elongated limbs of his 6ft 5in body stretch across the track like felled branches. Protruding from beneath his…
Still, good actors want good roles, and judging by the quality of those whom we auditioned, our show was sufficiently attractive. But before we found our cast, we had to endure the EPAsthe Equity Principal Auditions. For any show staged under an Equity contract, audition time must be reserved for…
Look to your left and then to your right. Is that pretty girl Phi Beta Kappa? Marry her. Getty Images Class of 2012, I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits…
This interview originally appeared in Kill Screen Toward the end, Al Lowe expresses some frustration shopping videogame ideas to publishers. He hasn’t been sitting on his laurels since we spoke with him. He recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new Leisure Suit Larry project! / / / It’s…
For startups like Path, recasting geek identity with a frat house swagger is a dangerous game. Illustration: Caitlin Kuhwald At the South by Southwest Interactive festival in March, I attended a talk titled "Adding Value as a Non-Technical No Talent Ass-Clown." It was given by Matt Van Horn, a…
Nathan Myhrvold in the cooking lab of Intellectual Ventures. Photograph by Chris Buck
As usual, Nathan Myhrvold has to get the dinosaur question out of the way first: Is it true, asks a saucer-eyed brunette with cleavage bursting through her zip-front denim jumpsuit, that he has a Tyrannosaurus rex…
Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start…
Jessica Dimmock/VII, for The New York Times In an industrial section of south-central Nashville, stuck between a homeless shelter and some railroad tracks, sits a little primary-colored Lego-block of a building with a Tesla tower on top. The inside holds all manner of curiosities and wonders —…
After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups.
We’re there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we’re living in it.
“The third generation of data and…
I don’t hate New York. Let me get that out of the way immediately. I don’t hate it, but why anyone would want to live there is beyond me. It’s a place to visit, like Las Vegas or New Orleans, where you entertain yourself for a few days, spend a lot of money, ogle and stare and eat and leave. Living…
In the family’s Tribeca loft. Credit Photograph by Max Farago As a general principle, Lena Dunham does not believe in removing anything that she has posted to the Internet; but, after she received a million and a half hits on YouTube for a video that showed her stripping down to a bikini, climbing…
By Alex Tomlinson. www.alex-tomlinson.com
FT233
Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian…
SAN FRANCISCO — Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined.…
James Erwin, 37, works for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals. He’s been doing that for a couple of years, and he enjoys it. It’s a pretty low-stress job for a person with a methodical turn of mind—good pay, short commute. He’s home by 5:30 every night to spend…
S o here is the president of the United States, enjoying canapés and small talk at Daniel, chef Daniel Boulud’s gourmet restaurant just off Park Avenue, with the right touch of upscale-whorehouse decor and enough Alice Waters in the kitchen to make it the place where every Wall Street guy takes his…
Photo: Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram , a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails. Many people have…
What went wrong Despite all of HavenCo's worst-case planning and bring-it-on rhetoric, the nations of the world never had to lift a finger to topple it. It failed of its own accord. In hindsight, it's hard to identify just one cause; HavenCo had so many problems, its failure was overdetermined. As a…
I always loved Tom Snyder’s chain-smoking, rambling, hour-long conversations with celebrities on his after-hours NBC Tomorrow show. Or when Larry King would show up and just talk and talk — sometimes clearly having no idea who he was even interviewing that night. The spirit of those shows may not…
I have known Randi Zuckerberg since the early days of Facebook, and I liked her immediately. And as a new mom balancing the working world, I feel a certain kinship with her. But as I've said from the beginning of this site, I won't let investors' interests dictate our coverage, and it's just as bad…
O’Shea’s Las Vegas Casino has been a bizarre contradiction for its entire existence, so it is no surprise that the casino’s impending shuttering on April 30 seems both too soon and not soon enough. Anachronistic and out of place from the day it opened in 1989, O’Shea’s will exit the world with the…
“He’s a visionary, he a great artist … He’s a movie director, he’s a one-stop shop … whatever direction he wants to go in his music, he knows it. It’s hot.” —Birdman, on Fred Durst, whose band Limp Bizkit signed to Cash Money Records last month. “It sounds like a monster; it literally sounds…
Joe Berkowitz 03.23.12 8:00 AM A nervous boy fastens half a loaf of bread to his face so another boy can deck him, creating an explosion of carbs. A young man dressed like an elder PGA pro putts around the inside of a Laundromat, slicing golf balls into open dryers. One dude surfs an ironing board…
Video of the Day Masthead Editor-in-Chief Alex Carnevale ( e-mail / tumblr / twitter ) Features Editor Mia Nguyen ( e-mail / tumblr / twitter ) Senior Editor Brittany Julious ( e-mail / tumblr / twitter ) This Recording is dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli. Please visit our…
We told you last week about Yahoo’s new web comedy push. Part of that effort is a partnership with Funny or Die with the web series First Dates with Toby Harris , starring comedian and Funny or Die writer, Seth Morris. Morris is the former artistic director of the Upright Citizens Brigade LA, and a…
News & Culture The soldiers and sailors may keep America free, but it's the guys who have no idea what time it is back home or where they are who keep America rich. They are the new American businessmen, and they are the foot soldiers on the front line of the new economy. But who are they, and where…
From left, Andrew Dost, Nate Ruess and Jack Antonoff, who make up the band Fun., a name they spell with a period. Lindsey Byrnes Sometimes the road to a hit single starts with a drink to calm the nerves. A year ago Nate Ruess, the frontman of the pop-rock trio Fun. , was anxious about meeting Jeff…
Download “Make Your Thing” Manifesto (PDF) Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success For the past two years or so, I’ve been crisscrossing the country, delivering an award-winning talk called Make Your Thing. (I should note that it has not won any…
Everyone who ever had a crush on Steve Martin developed an even bigger crush when he started writing for the New Yorker almost ten years ago. His first piece, a satire of middlebrow art world pretensions in which the narrator claims to own a birdbath sculpted by Raphael, reminded us of what we…
Pregame: How Are We Going to Play This? Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to…
Sam Calagione at Dogfish breweries. “I’m frustrated that one beer has been hammered down people’s throats,” he says. Credit Photographs By Martin Schoeller Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have…
What has 20 legs, 18 balls, and 1 brain? The State. David Lipsky joins the gang and tries to discover why last year’s hippest comedy troupe is this year’s most underemployed. Ben Garant is the group’s head writer. During pitches he jots notes, squirms in his chair, walks over desks. Garant’s main…
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