Patches are one of the best parts of gaming; you get to play Calvinball in real time, over the span of years. When developers announce their patches, though, they can sound ridiculous whether they’re describing what’s being fixed or introduced. I’ve been monitoring patch notes all year. Here are my…

Image Source: AndyKrycek6 No Man’s Sky fans can’t exactly play with each other, but they still like to come together to celebrate their communities. Somehow, a new player-created holiday became a story about conflict, betrayal and the disappearance of an entire civilization. No Man’s Sky players…

Illustration: Angelica Alzona In 2017, the proverbial sex game dam broke, allowing Steam to seemingly flood with sex games. Sex games have always existed of course, but after they started to pile up on Steam’s ‘new releases’ tab every week, they almost started to feel mainstream. Elsewhere, smaller…

Image via YouTube Needless to say, major spoiler action follows. Seriously this post pretty much is just a list of spoilers , arranged in vaguely chronological-ish order. Don’t read it if you’re going to get mad about spoilers . When Supreme Leader Snoke owned Kylo Ren for being a lame Darth Vader…

Among the many women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault or sexual harassment is Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” Photograph by David McNew / Getty A couple of weeks ago, as the Harvey Weinsteinstory continued to spool out across the news, I surveyed the growing…

Baby Driver type Movie Current Status In Season In April 2016, your writer visited the Atlanta set of Baby Driver , writer-director Edgar Wright’s thriller about a tinnitus-afflicted getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who continually blasts music into his ears. Among the principals with whom EW spoke…

Credit: Derek White @ DWhite Visuals “2017 North Atlantic White Conference Champions.” It’s got a pretty nice ring to it, right? That’s the headline for what was an amazing second season for Kingston Stockade FC , our NPSL club (4th Division, US Soccer Pyramid). For those who have been following our…

Artificial intelligence is seeping into every nook and cranny of modern life. AI might tag your friends in photos on Facebook or choose what you see on Instagram, but materials scientists and NASA researchers are also beginning to use the technology for scientific discovery and space exploration.…

The legendary filmmaker sat down with Marlow Stern to discuss his excellent new Netflix series ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ that Time magazine cover, and the “Klown Wit Da Nuclear Code.” Getty Those who’ve consumed his biography—or taken in the lovely film Southside with You —know that, were it not for…

Chamath Palihapitiya speaks at a Vanity Fair event in October 2016. Photo by Mike Windle/Getty Images for Vanity Fair Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and…

Spotify We were once responsible for describing our own tastes, which meant we sometimes lied about them. At the very least, we had strategically selective memories. I could tell you which Pitchfork bands I’d been loving lately — conveniently omitting how many times I’d listened to the original…

Knightscope A security robot has been put to work in San Francisco in an attempt to deter homeless people from forming tent cities. The robot uses lasers and sensors to monitor an area for criminal activity. Rather than intervene during a crime, it alerts human authorities. The robot's owner, the…

After premiering in the documentary competition at Sundance in January, my film The New Radical opened this week in limited theatrical release. In the film, I embed myself with two “radicals” over the course of four years. One is Amir Taaki, a young Iranian Brit who was one of the original…

In addition to stirring up debate on the nature of power and privacy, The New Radical questions what a documentary film should be. “Certain subjects make people very uncomfortable,” filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough tells No Film School. “They would rather not deal with it, or if they're going to deal with…

Documentarian Adam Bhala Lough tackles the intersection of digital rights and the far right in his provocative, problematic film "The New Radical." Lough sets his sights on Cody Wilson, the libertarian provocateur fighting for his constitutional right to provide diagrams of 3-D printed guns on the…

It’s no surprise that Paul Schrader , a filmmaker associated with such dark classics as “Taxi Driver” and “American Gigolo,” has a pessimistic streak. But it’s still bracing to hear him argue that humanity, as we know it, is unlikely to last through the next century. In an interview at the Toronto…

‘It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other,’ says the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters A former Facebook executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools that are ripping apart the social…

Tic-tac-toe, checkers , chess , Go , poker . Artificial intelligence rolled over each of these games like a relentless tide. Now Google’s DeepMind is taking on the multiplayer space-war videogame StarCraft II . No one expects the robot to win anytime soon. But when it does, it will be a far greater…

It’s hard to watch “The Room” without being left with some questions. Perhaps they are tearing you apart . Tommy Wiseau has heard them all. In countless media interviews and question-and-answer sessions with fans, the creator and star of the cult-classic 2003 film has tried to deliver answers.…

In September 2014, veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader was livid. He had recently directed “Dying of the Light,” a grim thriller starring Nicolas Cage as CIA agent Evan Lake, who obsesses over tracking terrorists while suffering from a brain disease and losing his mind. The movie’s financiers wanted a…

We talk about separating art from artist, but many of the accused abusers aren’t creators—they’re gatekeepers Photo by I. Schoonderwoerd W hat do we do with the art of monstrous men?” asked Claire Dederer in The Paris Review last month. When genius creators like Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski are…

On the morning a debt collector threatened to rape his wife, Andrew Therrien was working from home, in a house with green shutters on a cul-de-sac in a small Rhode Island town. Tall and stocky, with a buzz cut and a square, friendly face, Therrien was a salesman for a promotions company. He’d always…

Photo illustration by Slate . Photo by ShaunWilkinson/iStock. When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the…

The history of artificial intelligence is a procession of one-trick ponies. Over decades researchers have crafted a series of super-specialized programs to beat humans at tougher and tougher games. They conquered tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess. Most recently, Alphabet’s DeepMind research group…

Ten is too small a number to list all the great television of 2017. That may be what makes it the correct number. If I went longer — 20 shows, 25, even more — I’d seem to be simply listing everything I liked watching that year. (And I’d still be leaving out dozens of shows.) At ten, I’m making cuts…

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash “Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.” -Benjamin Hardy Most people are distracted right now. They’re distracted while they’re at work. They’re distracted when they’re with family and friends. They’re distracted at…

An award-winning U.S. diplomat who was seen as a rising star at the State Department has issued a scathing resignation letter, accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Donald Trump administration of undercutting the State Department and damaging America’s influence in the world. Elizabeth…

Amanda Feilding used to take lysergic acid diethylamide every day to boost creativity and productivity at work before LSD, known as acid, was made illegal in 1968. During her downtime, Feilding, who now runs the Beckley Foundation for psychedelic research, would get together with her friends to play…

When I was very young, before I was on the internet — even before the internet was really a thing you could “go on” — I would dial into BBSs (bulletin board systems). BBSs were kind of like private , micro-internets that people set up in their houses. You had to use a dial-up modem to connect to…

I llegitimate and corrupt. Using the FBI as a political weapon and America’s secret police. “Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night, banging through your door.” This is special counsel Robert Mueller’s…

The New York Times chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, share their favorite pictures of the year. Manohla Dargis In March, the producer-director Brett Ratner said that the website Rotten Tomatoes “was the worst thing we have in today’s movie culture,” directly blaming it for “the…

Bobby Cannavale answered his own door. There was no assistant hovering. We had to be quiet, Mr. Cannavale said, because on the first floor of their new house, the first proper house in which he has lived, his fiancée, the actress Rose Byrne, was tending to their baby, Rafa, two weeks old. Softly up…

To call Bitcoin the biggest and most obvious bubble in modern history may be a disservice to its surreality. The price of bitcoin has doubled four times this year. In early January, one bitcoin was worth about $1,000. By May, it hit $2,000. In June, it breached $4,000. By Thanksgiving, it was…

I’ve been harping in this blog for awhile on the possibility of another American division, so I was interested to see a new novel tackle that subject. American War , by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-born journalist who moved to Canada and then to the United States, applies a powerful dose of global…

In 1997, I joined the production team of Charlie Rose’s popular interview show. I was the only black journalist on staff. At the time, there was little to no recognition of what it meant to be black and female in a workplace dominated by white men. Twenty years later, in this watershed moment of…

Greed has many costs. Siegfried Layda/Getty Images The price of a Bitcoin reached a record high of $16,601.77 Thursday morning before falling to $15,500, in what has been a weeklong tear in a price that was $10,000 a month ago and just $1,000 in January. As the value of the digital currency has…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration The conversation about Senator Al Franken has agonized Democratic voters and liberal columnists for three weeks. On Thursday, the Minnesota Democrat announced he would resign “in the coming weeks,” making him the second Democratic legislator to step down recently…

I like sex. And I like it in and of itself — an important distinction, I think, when so many of us use sex as just another avenue for self-loathing or self-esteem; showmanship or subjugation. I like my body, I like myself, and I care about my partners’ pleasure, all of which I think is like 99% of…

E ditor's Note: Woody Allen, who declined to comment prior to publication, has long denied the allegations described in this Op-Ed. Dylan Farrow's allegations against Allen were investigated by sex-abuse experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who found no evidence of abuse. Some questioned their…

Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-­possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that—in the most painful and personal ways—movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew. In 1997, just…