Red Pilled: My Bizarre Week Using the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet
Scroll with me here. Somebody named BeatlesBaby makes “a very badass chicken curry.” Look, there’s a nice sepia-tinted pencil drawing of Ned Stark from Game of Thrones. Apparently, “Walking is the new smoking #Health #Fitness,” and some guy’s wife loves her treadmill desk. Read this: A Marine gives his beloved bomb-sniffing dog a hero’s farewell.…
These People Love Brendan Fraser More Than You Love Anything
What if there were a place on the internet where civility reigned? Where anime nazi avatars didn’t descend like locusts on any attempt at rational thought? A place where time stopped in 1999, and the only thing worth living and dying for is Airheads star Brendan Fraser? Friends, such a place exists. In most circles,…
Mr. Know-It-All: Is it OK For Me to Ask Customer Service Reps if They're Robots?
In, say, a customer service chat window, what’s the polite way to ask whether I’m talking to a human or a robot? Back in June 2006, before any of us needed to worry about whether we were talking to a robot in our daily interactions, it was up to contemporary artists to make people feel…
While You Were Offline: Wait, What Is Verrit and Why Are People Mad at It?
Hey, everyone. First off, please click this link in order to see a real seal cuddling with a cute plushy seal. Adorable, right? Yes, it is. Enjoy that, because everything else that happened online last week is pretty grim. Don't blame us. We just work here. Friends, hold your collective breath and jump in: This…
Now 25, DC Vertigo Relaunches With a New—and Old—Mission
For comic book fans, Vertigo Comics (now DC Vertigo) will forever be the line that gave them Sandman, Fables, Y The Last Man, Preacher, and dozens more. When the "for mature readers" imprint launched in 1993, writers like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison found not just a foothold, but a place to explore their creativity…
Sam Esmail's Homecoming Is Nothing Like Mr. Robot
Homecoming, the latest series with prestige TV bona fides to come to Amazon, is about as subtle and mysterious as a thriller can get. Based on the podcast of same name, it is, on the surface, about a group of soldiers returned from combat and the facility—called Homecoming—that seeks to treat their PTSD. However, as…
Let’s Slice Open the Biggest Contemporary Art Museum in the US
Compared to the swooping architecture of other fine-art institutions, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (aka Mass MoCA) is a hulking, big-boned anomaly. “We don’t just collect art and hang it on white walls,” says director Joseph Thompson. The cavernous complex displays works that couldn’t fit anywhere else. This spring, architecture firm Bruner/Cott & Associates…
Cantina Talk: Rey May Break the Force's Status Quo
As the release date for Star Wars: The Last Jedi approaches at ludicrous speed, stories on the creation of the movie—and teases about what might happen in it, or even after it—are beginning to pile up on all sides of the information superhighway. Don't know what to listen to or who to believe? Dear friends,…
Pornhub, the World's Biggest Adult Site, Gives Blind Users an Upgrade
Accessing the web presents unique challenges for the blind and visually impaired. Text-to-speech programs can be unreliable. Too many developers don’t follow best practices for navigating sites without visual cues. Destinations that lean heavily on images can prove inscrutable. They don’t have to, though. And Pornhub, the largest adult site on the web, is taking…
How'd the Cohen Hearing Go? That Depends on Your Filter Bubble
Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, is a flawed man with nothing left to lose, charting a path to redemption by finally coming clean about crimes and misdeeds allegedly committed by the president of the United States. Either that, or he’s a cheat and a crook who can’t be trusted, who’s already pleaded guilty to…