We spoke to more than two dozen comedians who helped Scott Aukerman’s ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ podcast get to 500 episodes. It’s a hazy Saturday afternoon in July and some of the greatest improvisers in the country are assembling in a nondescript office building on Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood.…

Photographs by Randall Slavin This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Sept. 18 NFL Preview Issue. Subscribe today! After the game, Aaron Rodgers got on the bus. It was unusually cold in Arlington during the week leading up to Super Bowl XLV; a winter storm had barreled into Texas, blanketing…

If you ever get a chance to tour Akron, Ohio , with Savannah and LeBron James, they might show you the tree-lined street Savannah grew up on with her parents, and the low-income housing where LeBron lived with his mom. Probably they’ll point out St. Vincent–St. Mary, LeBron’s high school, where a…

GQ Style: I've been curious about smoking weed, I guess... Especially when people talk about it helping with creativity. Aziz Ansari: To me, the argument for drugs is that you live your life with this one perspective all the time. Why not just see what it's like from a different perspective? To be…

In her new film Landline, Jenny Slate plays Dana Jacobs, a woman who finds herself drawn to a man ( played by hunky Finn Wittrock ) while in a relationship with a different man (played by brainy—though also hunky, just in a different way, you know!— Jay Duplass ). At the same time, Dana and her…

Welcome to Inefficiency Week . Over the next five days, we’re going to take a look at what we lose when we get lost in the chase for efficiency. We’ll explore the ways it’s changing the games we love to watch. We’ll remember its failures across the pop culture spectrum. And we’ll report on what it’s…

Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture A few weeks after the release of Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble,” the hard-charging lead single on his fourth album Damn. , the song landed at No. 1 on Billboard ’s streaming chart. It’s been on the chart ever since, never falling below No. 3 as users have played it…

Ownership and independence is everything. Our family’s movement is about letting other parents and prospects know, “Hey, you don’t have to feel pressured into thinking that there aren’t many options. There’s a different route that you can take in this.” All we want to do is plant the seed and watch…

(Columbia Pictures/Ringer illustration) Growing up in Lompoc, California, a mostly rural town north of Santa Barbara, Kelly Candaele was vaguely aware that his mother, Helen Callaghan, and his aunt Marge had played professional baseball back in the day. His mom still had her old glove, and would…

I ’m sitting by the fireplace, as I told him I would be. This is in a café near the Mission District in San Francisco. I spot him straightaway because he looks so jumpy. He’s never talked to a journalist before. We give each other surreptitious nods. He sits down. He’s nice-looking, in his early…

I was 10 weeks pregnant when my sister called to tell me thatmy dad had unexpectedly died of a heart attack. At that moment, everything about my dadwhirled through my mind all at once—the crinkle of his eyes when he laughed, theswagger of his walk, the intonation of his voice when he called me…

THE CAVALIERS' GROUP TEXT chain is aptly named BORED. Channing Frye's nimble mind requires constant stimulation, so he instituted BORED shortly after he joined Cleveland in February 2016, contacting the entire roster and encouraging all of his new teammates to share random thoughts. Last week's…

Breaking Into the Booth Some of the brightest minds in NBA media are often kept on the sideline, but figures like Doris Burke and Rosalyn Gold-Onwude are

When I walk into the Chappaqua dining room in which Hillary Clinton is spending her days working on her new book, I am greeted by a vision from the past. Wearing no makeup and giant Coke-bottle glasses, dressed in a gray mock-turtleneck and black zip sweatshirt, Hillary looks less Clinton and more…

A s LeBron James embarks on his ninth Eastern Conference finals since 2007, we look back at a pair of his most legendary road contests. This, the first of a

In her sublime new Netflix standup special, Old Baby , premiering today, Maria Bamford performs a comedy set in increasingly larger venues. What begins as a few jokes in front of a mirror progresses to a living room, onto a bowling alley, and so on, until she goes out with a bang on a big stage. The…

A s we took a seat in the back of the Commissary, a restaurant on the Sony Pictures Studios lot, Mike Judge pointed out a man seated two booths away. It was Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures and former head of Fox’s film division, where he oversaw the rocky release of Judge’s 2006 film,…

The Chainsmokers Are Legit Now, and Also Boring On the first — really! — album from the bad boys of EDM (Getty Images/Ringer illustration) To the extent that

Funny or Die at 10, an Oral History of a Comedy Juggernaut When Funny or Die launched on April 12, 2007, with “The Landlord” —a supercheap two-minute sketch pitting Will Ferrell against a swearing toddler—the premise was so simple even a 2-year-old could understand it: A user submitted a homemade…

The legend has been passed down by NBA generations, chronicled like a Homeric odyssey. The tale they tell is of Kevin Garnett and the 2007-08 Celtics, and the seminal moment of a revolution. Bryan Doo, Celtics strength and conditioning coach, recalls it as if it were yesterday, how before a game in…

C hristopher Knight was only 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for

Impossible Foods has created something extraordinary: a vegan burger catered to the most voracious of carnivores. It is the next chapter in America’s proud and disgraceful history with the burger, our most important cultural export. It promises to do a lot of good — but is it any good? (Xenia Latii)…

Share Share Getty Images / Jim Smeal /BEI / Shutterstock / BuzzFeed Last January Kanye West called Taylor Swift to ask whether she’d mind if he wrote a song in which he referenced having sex with her. After hearing the lyrics, she told him that they “didn’t matter” to her. But she had an idea. “If…

Every episode of Billy on the Street is a window on a social experiment unfolding on the streets of New York. How would New Yorkers react if a tall white man with a microphone breathlessly ran up to them to ask about the cancellation of Bones ? They are startled, they try to ignore him, others are…

The beach is the centerpiece of the city’s promise of escape — escape from cold winters or college classes or family, where you can drink goblets of bright green liquor and cruise down Ocean Drive in a rented tangerine Lamborghini before retiring to the warm sand. To the casual observer, the beach…

Simmons vs. Gladwell: The Future of Football Sagging ratings, national controversy, horrifying head injuries, shameless greed: The conversation about the NFL has officially changed. Is it too late to fix it? By Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell (Aaron Dana) S immons: “Is he crying?” “He’s just…

After midnight, when the kids are down and the streets are still, LeBron James asks his wife if she wants to go on a cruise. That’s the term he uses, and because Savannah has been with him since high school she knows he is not referring to a yacht in the Caribbean. They head to the garage, grateful…

Over the past year, the swell of chatbots and virtual assistants has grown larger, and their capabilities have grown more complex. Want a bot to schedule your meetings ? Collect employee status updates ? Remind you to bring an umbrella if it's going to rain? Done, done, and done. But while…

Why bother? If this all sounds like a tremendous amount of work just to uncover some video game Easter eggs, rest assured it is . The most dedicated secret

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero. Viceland On the top floor of the Vice building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there is a particular conference room at the end of the hall with a high amount of traffic going in and out the door. Inside, conference room tables and any semblance of traditional office decor…

LATE KNIGHTJon Stewart, photographed in New York, 2010. Photograph by Andrew Eccles/August. Jon Stewart (The Daily Show host, 1999-2015): My wildest dream for

What would you tell yourself about today’s NBA, if you could go back in time Getty Images/Ringer illustration White letters on a black screen: The following is a true story. FADE IN: CLOSE-UP of a tube television showing the final moments of the 2002 NBA Finals. MARV ALBERT [VOICE-OVER]: And that’s…

A brief history of the NBA in eight fake quotes, five exclamation points and two question marks: 1946–56: “White guys, set shots, clotheslines and layups!” 1956–66: “Hi, I’m Bill, and this is Elgin, Wilt and Oscar.” 1967–76: “Things are going well, so let’s double the number of leagues, triple the…

For a few months a while back, it sure felt like the A.V. Club, where I was a staffer for about 16 years and remain a columnist today, was mentioned on The Best Show and Hollywood Handbook on a weekly basis, and never in a positive or non-mocking light. The website, and particularly its podcast…

Zarif Khan, a.k.a. Hot Tamale Louie, arrived in small-town Wyoming in 1909 and eventually became a local legend. Credit Illustration by Oliver Munday The first person in Sheridan, Wyoming, to learn that Hot Tamale Louie had been knifed to death was William Henry Harrison, Jr. The news came by…

Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of the Times , who writes a review every week—and who occasionally writes one that creates a national hubbub about class, money, and soup—was waiting for a table not long ago at Momofuku Nishi, a modish new restaurant in Chelsea. Wells is fifty-three and…

Desus Nice, left, and the Kid Mero on the set of their new late-night show on Viceland. An Rong Xu for The New York Times This past Tuesday afternoon, in a conference room on the third floor of Vice’s sprawling Williamsburg offices, the comic team of Desus & Mero was going through its daily…

Smith’s dynamic on-court talent has often been stymied by a reputation for impulsiveness. Credit Illustration by Rebecca Clarke J. R. Smith, who has played in…