Tag: CULTURE

It's rare that the world experiences such a perfect storm of schadenfreude as the one offered up by #FyreFestival, the on-the-ground reports from an "exclusive" musical fest in the Bahamas gone terribly wrong. Even if the rest of the week had proved to a battle to maintain composure in an ambivalent and occasionally cruel world,…

In the past seven days, Nintendo abandoned its past, America's relationship with North Korea got appreciably worse (so did the country's relationship with Russia), and the internet had a lot of feelings about a Star Wars video. It's been quite the week. Do you have a sinking feeling that something escaped your notice during those…

If you ever want to find a bathroom on Vulcan or ask for dressage lessons in Essos, you’ll need to learn a constructed language first. "Conlangs", as they're known, are common in genre movies and literature, and through them, a viewer or reader can better appreciate what it would be like to approach an Arwen…

Pinchas Gutter has returned to Majdanek at least a dozen times, but this trip is his final one to the onetime Nazi concentration camp. His first was one he was 11, when he was taken to Majdanek; now he's 85 years old, and this is the last time he'll come here to tell people what…

The best word to describe PatriotHole's launch probably won't ever apply to the site again: quiet. Sometime this morning, The Onion's spinoff brand ClickHole became PatriotHole, a new site promising to provide a "loud light in the darkness." True to claim, the site features a color—a shade of ’70s chain-restaurant orange Breitbart News readers might…

Now that Star Wars Celebration is over, things have been fairly quiet in the Land o' Lucas. But really, that stillness is to be expected—pretty much everything fans wanted to know was announced during that four-day stretch. Well, almost everything. After Celebration ended, Disney revealed the release date for Star Wars: Episode IX and also…

Playground-style slides. Corporate-issued backpacks and fleeces emblazoned with company names straight out of a Pokedex. A CEO who brazenly circumvents local regulation. If the tech industry was a person, it would sew MOCK ME onto all of its shirts so as not to deplete the global supply of scotch tape. Nothing could be easier, one…

Lots of gangster movies end in a shoot-out. Director Ben Wheatley's new tough-guy flick, Free Fire, begins with shots fired—and never stops. The entire movie is a firefight. "It started from reading an FBI transcript of a gun battle in Miami that happened in the 1980s. It was kind of forensic blow-by-blow report," Wheatley says.…

Covering Star Wars news is a tricky business. Sometimes there are huge announcements from the Land of Lucas; sometimes the most interesting information comes via theories on fan sites. Today's roundup, coming right on the heels of the Star Wars Celebration fan convention, is full of the former. Not only did Lucasfilm drop the first…

My pal won’t text me because I don’t use Signal. But he’ll say anything on social media. He’s being annoying, right? When I think of encryption, I think of Robert Frost. I’ve noticed that the poet is often quoted by cyber­security consultants. “Good fences make good neighbors,” they like to say, quoting from Frost’s “Mending…