Tag: CULTURE

August was full of news about hacks, leaks, and even hacks that led to leaks. But it was nature that arrested our attention and dominated the news cycle. On August 21, a total solar eclipse cast a shadow over a large part of the US. For two and a half minutes, much of the nation…

When Thomas Wolfe wrote "you can’t go home again," he clearly hadn't tried to do it in virtual reality—because right now, my body is sitting in an office in midtown Manhattan, but my brain is back in my childhood bedroom in Ohio. There’s a robot that responds to voice commands; a toy model of Castle…

With the news that J.J. Abrams has been hired to cowrite and direct Episode IX, Lucasfilm's message is clear: It's time to restore peace to the Star Wars galaxy. The past year has been a particularly chaotic one for the franchise, which has endured the third-act triage of Rogue One; the filmmaker switcheroo on next…

On February 2, 2011, a horde of men, armed with long sticks and whips and riding camels and horses, attacked the hundreds of thousands of protesters who packed Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, parting the crowd as if it were the Red Sea and scattering protesters as they went. The horses’ saddles were a brilliant…

On May 3, 2008, a sunny Saturday in Copenhagen, a crowd gathered along a dock to watch a 58-foot submarine be lowered into the water. Part art project, part engineering feat, the submarine weighed 40 tons and had been built by volunteers at minimal cost from donated iron and other parts. The onlookers cheered as…

Reality is stressful—and despite our best efforts, almost impossible to avoid. Technology, with its whiz-bang push alerts demanding our constant attention, is making us crazy. The news cycle isn't just ceaseless, it's straight-up depressing for people of every imaginable ideology. We’re all exhausted, nervous, and in need of a break. Thankfully, there's television. (Not news.…

The most telling piece of symbolism from Harvey Weinstein’s appearance at a Phoenix restaurant late last week, where he disguised himself in a blond wig and orange makeup, can be found in the inscription of the black baseball cap he wore, which reportedly read “2:24.” It was a subtle, if self-absorbed, reference to biblical verse…

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.…

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,…

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…