Journal

The comedian talks about her path to the playful, glib, and ultimately life-affirming HBO special everyone will be talking about.

“I’m just a person,” comedian Tig Notaro says multiple times during her new HBO special. It’s both a deflection of incoming applause and a direct rebuke to peers who clearly relish soaking up those standing-Os. But here’s the thing: Tig Notaro is more than just a person. She’s both a living legend and someone advanced enough to hate that designation and seek to explode it.

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Apple Music pitches personality, Foot Locker gets awkward for NFL season, the Manning brothers regulate Gatorade sales.

Back in 2006, Xbox dropped a big ol’ emo ad bomb on the gaming world with the launch of Gears of War. Instead of the usual, testosterone-soaked soundtrack, the music backdropping scenes from the sci-fi shooter game was Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” It was considered a milestone in video game marketing and ushered in the now-familiar trend of pairing game action with music that tugs the heartstrings over the trigger finger.

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Every moment of too-hot, late-making, subway frustration is actually a love connection waiting to happen in this sweet, surreal video.

The New York subway is a magical steel caterpillar that takes riders anywhere they want to go in the city. Except when it doesn’t, which is gallingly often. (Or maybe it just seems that way in Co.Create’s memory. Hard to remember every instance it runs perfectly.) Adrift in the immediacy that is the city’s stock in trade, New Yorkers have a tendency to laser-focus on the frustration of the moment—to the exclusion of all else. A whimsical new video suggests that by doing so we may be just missing our soulmates on every commute.

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John Lewis does it again, and it’s not even Christmas.

By now we’re used to being impressed, and sometimes weepy, by the advertising of U.K. retailer John Lewis, thanks to ad classics like Monty the Penguin and “The Bear & The Hare.”

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If the Earth’s resources were on a balance sheet, we’d already be in the red.

There’s still four and a half months to go in 2015, yet we’ve already used up our ecological budget for the year. Earth Overshoot Day—the point at which human demand exceeds the limits of what the planet can regenerate—fell on August 13.

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As food and labor costs rise in the restaurant industry, some businesses are looking for technological solutions to the annoying problem of expensive humans.

A $15-per-hour minimum wage might not lead to armies of content, sufficiently compensated fast food workers. It may instead lead to fewer employees, as bottom-line-obsessed companies move more quickly to replace “expensive” labor with tireless robots. And rising labor costs aren’t the only things getting more expensive for restaurants—wholesale food and real estate prices are also shooting up, says the Washington Post.

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This makes The Expendables look likeThe English Patient.

This time last year, Kevin Hart and Dave Franco illustrated the full power of their gaming rivalry to launch EA Sports’ Madden 15 with a wacky musical number that included flagrant vehicular vandalism, a bit of physical violence, some light stalking, and an epic party that ended with Franco’s house on fire. Now, after a couple of 15-second teasers for Madden 16, the brand turns the batsh*t crazy up to 11 with an action movie trailer that makes The Expendables look like The English Patient.

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The team will be separate from the life extension-focused Calico Labs.

Google cofounder and now-Alphabet president Sergey Brin announced in a blog post last night that Alphabet would be spinning off the life sciences work inside Google X into its own company.

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Tesla charging stations are making their way to eligible Airbnb homes.

Calling all Airbnb hosts in California: If you list your entire home, have rented out your place more than five times, and boast an overall rating of at least four stars, Tesla has a proposition for you.

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Meet the Chinese artist who finds creativity in fire.

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist based in New York. One of his mediums is gunpowder, one of his native country’s most spectacular and ancient inventions. And this is his latest sculpture, the 500-meter Sky Ladder, which lived its brief two-and-a-half-minute life at Huiyu Island Harbour, Quanzhou, Fujian, last month.

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