Zoran Milich / Reuters Six months ago I sent an email out to BuzzFeed’s editorial staff with a simple subject headline: “Selfie stick: awful or amazing?” I created a monster. The resulting 150-plus email thread has proven remarkably persistent and set off a debate that continues — much to the…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

​ SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure…

GIF In the 1920s, a young law school graduate named Yoshiyuki Iwase left Tokyo and returned to his hometown of Onjuku, a fishing village in eastern Japan. With an early Kodak camera, he began documenting the traditions of the ama , women who dove for seaweed, shellfish, and most famously, pearls.…

T he first time I met Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, they were wearing Rollerblades and Glazer was psyching herself up to simulate sex with a giant oak tree. Tucked out of view on a shady forest path in Prospect Park on a warm day in September, the stars and creators of Broad City were filming a…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Laura June Topolsky Staff Writer at New York Magazine’s The Cut. Writing a memoir for Penguin. I love you! The Awl Be less stupid.

Credit Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham A: Hey, girl! So great to see you at Mike’s party on New Year’s. You free this week? Want to grab drinks? * B: Yo!!!!! Sorry it took me so long to respond. I’m the worst. Yes! I’d love to! First round is on me because I’m so terrible. Tuesday??? A: Ugh,…

​ The rectangle almost completely filled Central Hall, the largest and historically least depressing room in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Several billions in bitcoin and bullion had been spent, and conservation experts from Facebook Centers across the country had been flown in to help restore…

The baddest motherfucker on Earth and I are in a posh restaurant in a poor city with two guys he picked up at some point or another to shoot guns and drink beer with whenever he isn't elbowing people in the face, and we're laughing, the four of us, hearty guffaws that crash around the table. I'm…

Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed Last month in New York , Adam Sternbergh began his long cultural history of emojis by contrasting Face With Tears of Joy, the world’s most popular emoji, with the tilde, the venerable squiggle that is surfed on QWERTY keyboards by the ESC key and in math means…

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki Walt Disney Pictures The nominations won’t be announced until Jan. 15, but it’s safe to say that the greatest filmmaker associated with the 2015 Academy Awards has already received his Oscar, delivered a modest but revealing acceptance speech and flown home to Japan and,…

Thirty-four years ago, at the launch of Ted Turner's Cable News Network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. "Barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends," Turner declared. And in anticipation, he prepared…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

In the weeks and months after I responded to every PR email in my inbox for a week , I received dozens more emails from PR people responding to the unsavory experiment. But the note I got from Ed Zitron, the 28-year-old author of This Is How You Pitch: How to Kick Ass in Your First Years of PR , was…

Maria Bustillos change my mind The Awl Be less stupid.

Casey Johnston Studied Physics, Supposedly. The Awl Be less stupid.

I t started as a continuation of the misadventures of the Griswold family; it ended up becoming one of the most surprisingly popular and oft-quoted holiday movies of all time. This month marks the 25th anniversary of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, in which beleaguered patriarch Clark…

O f all the odd mutations of American culture to be exported abroad, Japan’s KFC Christmas tradition may be one of the oddest. This month, KFC Japan will bring in revenue up to ten times greater than what it earns during other months of the year. Life-size Colonel Sanders statues—a staple in the…

Ask Andrew W.K.: What's Better? Nachos or Tacos? Or sign in with a social account: FACEBOOK GOOGLE + TWITTER YAHOO! Don't have an account yet? Sign Up › Connect. Discover. Share. Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music,…

The end of the year is always an expensive clusterfuck of expense, travel, and joyless obligations made more miserable by the fact that several major holidays occur within six weeks. But all of this pressure and stress could be resolved if we'd only do one thing: move Christmas to January 25th. Hear…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Via youtube.com Angela was on call when a young boy with autism — who I’ll call Tim — came up to her for help. Tim’s friend had recently committed suicide, and it was clear he was shaken and upset. Within minutes of talking, Angela understood that Tim didn’t have a family he felt comfortable talking…

Getty Images In September, when it wasn’t quite autumn in New York but after the long hot summer had ended, I rode up an elevator in New York’s Flat Iron district to the offices of First Look Media to meet with the guerrilla editors of The Racket. The Racket has since folded, without ever launching.…

I. Ruby lost her virginity in July of this year, not long after she turned 28. Five days later, she knew, with deep certainty and not a little dread, that she was pregnant. Her nipples grew and darkened, she says; her abdomen tingled. The man she'd slept with refused to see her, and when he finally…

Advanced Embalming begins Monday morning at 8. A small group of 20- and 21-year-olds, all of them dressed in too-big black and dark gray suits, shuffle tiredly into the classroom. Professor Barry Walch stands behind the podium, holding a stack of the students’ exams from last week. They did not do…

The continuing influence of The Wonder Years. Courtesy of ABC The Wonder Years , ABC’s beloved sitcom about coming of age in suburbia, premiered in 1988 and was set in 1968. But the show so follows Mad Men creator Matt Weiner’s maxim that people don’t always know when they are living through history…

Writer. Director. Movie star. Broadway actor. Voice actor. He appeared on both Saturday Night Live and In Living Color . He created a hit sitcom. He used to host a late-night show, for which he won an Emmy, and he’s currently producing a new one . For over 25 years, he has remained one of the most…

The American Room Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, in which a New Jersey man named Gary Brolsma danced in his chair to a Moldovan pop song called “Dragostea din tei. ” The video is blurry;…

The brain, showing the cerebral cortex. Photo via Wellcome Images A year ago this winter, I began to not recognize myself. Sleep was the first thing to change. Progressively, over the course of about two weeks, I began struggling to drift off. As a 24-year-old man with a good supply of hash, this…

Writing for THR's current issue, the 'Top Five' writer, director and star tackles Hollywood's third rail as he explains what it's really like to be black in the entertainment industry (hint: you get asked to be Huggy Bear, not Starsky or Hutch) and the "slave state" of Mexicans: "If Kevin Hart is…

I once saw Chris Rock in New York attempting to be a New Yorker. I was getting a sandwich near my office in a building that shared a space with a gym. There was Rock, alone. On his ears sat a pair of cartoonishly large, Princess Leia–like headphones. I’m sure there was music playing on those…