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…
The Alien Overlords of Captive State Might Be Coming—for Us
The world suffers an imbalance. An alien authority known as the Legislators has invaded Earth under the false promise of “peace, unity, and harmony.” Governments have been seized. Militaries demobilized. Cities walled off. The great, last hopes of the contemporary age have fully rotted, giving way to a climate of fear and subjugation. Social fractures…
Ed Skrein Leaving Hellboy Proves How Easily Hollywood Could Stop Whitewashing
Ed Skrein is not an A-lister. He's a good actor who showed up in Deadpool and starred in Transporter Refueled, but he's not a certified star. But now that he's quit the Hellboy reboot, his is a name Hollywood likely won't forget for a while. Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, the British actor gave up…
Mr. Know-It-All: Should I Let My Spouse Look at My Browser History?
Is My Browser History Fair Game for My Spouse? Before there were browser windows, there were regular windows—ones you could see through. And one day in 1914, Florence Carman saw too much. Florence’s husband, Edwin, a local physician on Long Island, had an office on the ground floor of their home. One of its windows…