Sex, Lies, and Video Games
Oomba was a startup designed to make a lot of money from the games industry. Instead, everyone played each other.
Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Oomba was a startup designed to make a lot of money from the games industry. Instead, everyone played each other.
Amanda Chicago Lewis The Verge Nov 2020 35min Permalink
Police body cams were supposed to change everything in Chicago. But a lot of them were rarely turned on.
Samah Assad, Christopher Hacker, Dave Savini CBS Nov 2020 Permalink
The mob that rampaged the halls of Congress included infamous white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.
Sabrina Tavernise, Matthew Rosenberg New York Times Jan 2021 10min Permalink
The inside story of the megadonor and the Chinese casino money flooding our elections.
Matt Isaacs Mother Jones Feb 2016 25min Permalink
Deana Lawson’s regal, loving, unburdened photographs imagine a world in which Black people are free from the distortions of history.
Jenna Wortham New York Times Magazine May 2021 30min Permalink
A convert dies in the Arizona desert and the secrets of a controversial guru start spilling out.
Nina Burleigh Rolling Stone Jun 2013 30min Permalink
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?
Jason Fagone San Francisco Chronicle Jul 2021 50min Permalink
How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.
Rebecca Jennings The Goods Aug 2021 30min Permalink
Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?
Stephanie Clifford Elle Dec 2020 20min Permalink
Black people formed one of the largest militias in the U.S. Now its leader is in prosecutors’ crosshairs.
Will Carless, Alain Stephens The Trace Oct 2021 30min Permalink
Scandal, conspiracy, and cover-ups in the theft of the “Irish Crown Jewels” from Dublin Castle.
Dan Nosowitz Atlas Obscura Nov 2021 Permalink
An occasionally collaborative profile of the director.
Joe Hagan Vanity Fair Nov 2021 Permalink
Finding the author of Pictures for Sad Children.
Justin Ling Input Nov 2021 30min Permalink
How online sales of highly regulated, super-toxic rodenticides exploit gaps in the law and imperil wildlife.
Chris Sweeney Audubon Dec 2021 Permalink
The story of imprisoned boxer James Scott, who contended for the light heavyweight title by staging fights inside Rahway prison.
Brin-Jonathan Butler, Kurt Emhoff SB Nation Mar 2014 40min Permalink
Meribah Knight is a reporter with Nashville Public Radio. She won the Polk Award for Podcasting for “The Kids of Rutherford County,” produced with ProPublica and Serial, which revealed a shocking approach to juvenile discipline in one Tennessee county.
“Where does it leave me? It leaves me with a searing anger that is going to propel me to the next thing. But we’ve made some real improvement. And that’s worth celebrating. That’s worth recognizing and saying, This work matters, people are paying attention.”
This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Apr 2024 Permalink
Thomas Pynchon walks down a New York City street in the middle of the morning. He has a light gait. He floats along. He looks canny and whimsical, like he'd be fun to talk to; but, of course, he's not talking. It's a drizzling day, and the writer doesn't have an umbrella. He's carrying his own shopping bag, a canvas tote like one of those giveaways from public radio. He makes a quick stop in a health-food store, buys some health foods. He leaves the store, but just outside, as if something had just occurred to him, he turns around slowly and walks to the window. Then, he peers in, frankly observing the person who may be observing him. It's raining harder now. He hurries home. For the past half-dozen years, Thomas Pynchon, the most famous literary recluse of our time, has been living openly in a city of 8 million people and going unnoticed, like the rest of us.
Nancy Jo Sales New York Nov 1996 15min Permalink
“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”
Teju Cole The Atlantic Oct 2012 15min Permalink
Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days. I called him.
Errol Morris New York Times Jun 2011 1h25min Permalink
On animal cremation and burial in New York:
Riding around Manhattan on a delivery run with a car full of pet cremains, it's hard not to look at the world differently. The omnipresence of pets becomes glaringly obvious, and their inevitable fate is never far from the mind. It's easy to imagine the whippet being jaywalked across Eighth Avenue getting hit by a car. The cocker spaniel on 23rd Street? A bucket of cocker bones in the making.
Steven Thrasher Village Voice Nov 2009 15min Permalink
The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound up with psychological defeat.
Vivian Gornick The Atlantic Jun 1979 25min Permalink
What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it’s because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it’s our culture’s idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole. Or perhaps it’s because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.
Ruth Padawer New York Times Magazine Aug 2011 40min Permalink
On the TechCrunch founder’s venture capital fund, and a new breed of startup investor.
As Twitter-loving VC investors have become brand names themselves (Fred Wilson, Marc Andreessen, Chris Sacca), what one might call the auteur theory of venture capitalism has emerged—the idea that startup companies bear the unique creative signature of those who invested in them. To study a venture capitalist’s portfolio is to study his oeuvre.
Felix Gillette Businessweek Nov 2011 10min Permalink
Billy Joe Frazier was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Laurel Bay, S.C., the youngest of 12 children. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Dolly, worked in the fields, and the youngster known as Billy Boy dropped out of school at 13. He dreamed of becoming a boxing champion, throwing his first punches at burlap sacks he stuffed with moss and leaves, pretending to be Joe Louis or Ezzard Charles or Archie Moore.
Richard Goldstein New York Times Nov 2011 15min Permalink
Rosie grew up in a succession of decrepit houses in South London with one man and a rotating cast of women, who claimed that they had found her on the streets as an infant. The man, Aravindan Balakrishnan—Comrade Bala, as he wanted to be called—was the head of the household. He instructed the women to deny Rosie’s existence to outsiders, and forbade them from comforting her when she cried.
Simon Parkin New Yorker Dec 2016 10min Permalink