All the world is tall grass, thanks to the augmented reality of Pokemon Go, which saw its US release yesterday. A coworker snagged a Pidgey in our offices; I’m going fishing tonight for Magikarp. The creatures menace us everywhere.
Plenty of small talk sucks. It may be bad if, as novelist Karan Mahajan wrote recently for The New Yorker, you come from a culture with no norm of small talk and you have to learn the art of idle banter. Small talk is also bad when both parties have other places to be and are just going through the motions of…
The splashiest piece of sportswriting in my lifetime might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile of Roger Federer, printed in the New York Times’s short-lived Play magazine. A wrinkled copy of it lived under my old Xbox console for years, so that I knew exactly where to revisit it. At the time, the essay felt…
Several times a year—five if I can—I get stuck by a needle. A friendly hand hunts the crooks of both my elbows for a vein fat enough to poke, swabs it down with iodine, and dabs the spot with a marker as if it were a treasure map. Depending on whether or not I’m in the mood for sterile and unthreatening gore, I either…
This piece in Toronto Life, written by a (purported) high-spending, globe-trotting 31-year-old pharmacist who lives with his parents, is so plainly framed to bait haters that it seems a shame to even go at it. There’s actually something bubbling under the surface of this piece, which I’ll get to, but it’s hard to…
While Steph Curry tried some public venting on court last night as his Golden State Warriors were getting waxed in the NBA Finals, his wife Ayesha tried some out online. But her Twitter conspiracy theorizing about the purportedly rigged NBA was soon followed by some emotional context: she was frustrated because…
Kyrie Irving did gorgeous, stupefying things on a basketball court Monday night, but for me and my oldest friends, it was just an elevated version of a familiar sensation, a shot of nostalgia via the NBA Finals. Before the Cleveland Cavaliers guard played an injury-shortened season for Duke, and before he enrolled at…
The gym looked like a South American greenhouse: paned with glass, painted in greens ranging from pastel to neon, studded with tropical foliage, an unevenly paved brick patio sprouting weeds, all surfaces blanketed in a thin film of dust. Everything was highly functional but had the vague look of disrepair, just…
You might be unfazed by a new study that told you the average player in the NBA—where the average salary last season was $4 million and the median salary was just shy of $2 million—spends $42,500 a month. (Give him another week and he’ll spend more than the median American household earns in a year: $51,939, according…
If you’re a believer in video-as-therapy and you possess a Netflix account or the log-in of a very distant relation, Bob Ross is now there waiting for you. The streaming service just added his Beauty is Everywhere series—though he’s best known for the PBS series The Joy of Painting—wherein viewers are soothed by his…
Nobody moves to New York City for the wildlife, though pigeon lovers will never bore, and you can witness rats of previously inconceivable sizes and athletic ability. Even the parks, despite all the binocular-clad olds, seem better suited for people- than bird-watching, and it’s likely that you will live here for…
[Adjective]-ass [noun]. It’s a construction equally dear to elite-ass athletes and cool-ass bloggers—and even a few academic-ass linguists, as this illuminating post from JSTOR’s Daily blog reveals. An intensifier that renders its adjective friend that much pungent or that much more emphatic, “-ass” offers an option…
A guy named Zach emailed our tips line to let us know that Doritos make for excellent kindling for a fire. So our staff decided to experiment with a bunch of snacks you might bring camping for their multi-purpose potential. “Experiment” is a generous term; we took chips of all different sizes and surface areas, lit…
I’m open to the idea of people eating bugs for protein in the long run, and not just for the cheap novelty of Let’s eat some freakin’ creepy-crawlies!!!! You can set aside any issues of animal cruelty and still acknowledge that the meat industry overtaxes lots of resources—land, water, feed crop that must itself be…
There is a man in Australia who goes out into the bushland of Far North Queensland to live out his caveman fantasies. The practice is called primitive technology, which he describes as “a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials.” Lest the vagueness of “things”…
Those of us not blessed with central air conditioning will be dusting off their AC units and installing them in their windows now that we’re entering true summer. If you’ve managed this feat without mangling a toe or a passerby on the street below, congrats, but there’s something else to consider before you cool off…
How do you cultivate a “cool” brand when nobody cares about your product? As sneaker brands try to elbow their way into a market dominated by Nike, some suspect the answer is to get people to resell your shoes, even though that doesn’t directly earn the shoe-makers a single cent. You see, this lucrative industry…
A long weekend approaches. Let’s say that you have not been blessed with the kind of friends or family who plan nice things for your lazy self to do (while smoothly handling all the tedious logistics), or that you have purposefully blocked this space of time out to do nothing and be with no one. Sloth will try to keep…
People trying to convince you to eat non-meat proteins have two broad strategies at their disposal: double-down on the food’s unmistakably non-meat identity (say, tempeh) and make a case for its deliciousness on its own right. Or pander to meat-loving tastes by building the best possible simulacrum of animal flesh.…
This detail would even feel heavy-handed in a novel about a dystopian future ruled by the libertarian tech elite, but here you go: in San Francisco’s Dolores Park, people will be able to reserve chunks of the park as part of a two-month pilot program by the Recreation and Parks Department. You can make the…
