The same game can be different things to different people, with gender, history, age, cultural background and political beliefs working to influence and funnel its messages and meanings for every unique player. Games can provide us with many things: entertainment, escapism, an arena for learning and…

Staffers are leaving their phones at home, using secret apps and monitoring each other’s social media. Many White House aides are using encrypted apps or leaving their personal cellphones at home in case their bosses initiate phone checks of the sort that press secretary Sean Spicer used last month…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web.Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian T oday marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web. I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and…

By David Livingston/Getty Images Noël Wells opens her new film, Mr. Roosevelt , with a frenetic and unsuccessful audition that nonetheless highlights her uncanny knack for impressions. It was exactly that talent that landed her a spot on Saturday Night Live in 2013. But despite some solid sketch…

When Barack Obama revealed that his last phone call as President was to Angela Merkel, reaffirming their alliance and friendship of the last eight years, he wasn’t just saying goodbye. He was handing over his baton. The German Chancellor isn’t just the leader of Europe, she is now the de-facto…

Chuck Berry, who with his indelible guitar licks, brash self-confidence and memorable songs about cars, girls and wild dance parties did as much as anyone to define rock ’n’ roll’s potential and attitude in its early years, died on Saturday at his home near Wentzville, Mo. He was 90. The St. Charles…

Over the weekend, a photo of a young man in a suit “air humping” the “Fearless Girl” — a public art piece directly across from the iconic Charging Bull statue in Lower Manhattan — went viral. You may not have realized it — but the “Fearless Girl” statue was rocking a red, Moms Demand Action for Gun…

HONG KONG — Strangers ask him if he was wearing pants. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing. And, no, he was not abusing his daughter in trying to get her out of camera range during a live television interview. Robert E. Kelly, the so-called “BBC dad” whose young children wandered into the room while he…

An apartment building decorated with Turkish flags in Amsterdam. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turks living in Europe to have more children to counter the West’s “injustices.” Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press Calling Turks the “future of Europe,” Turkey ’s president on Friday implored his…

Ghosts of the past, both literal and figurative, haunt “T2 Trainspotting,” Danny Boyle’s droll and wistful return to the Scottish reprobates who, 21 years ago in “Trainspotting,” made heroin addiction a blast and bodily waste a metaphor for squandered lives. Excremental flourishes notwithstanding,…

Two men square up. One is shirtless, encased in muscle. He hunches forward, his afro obscured yet impeccable, gleaming in the sun. The other rocks a crisp white t-shirt. A bleached blond cowlick spills down his forehead. Determined blue eyes sparkle underneath his black eyebrows. He glares at his…

I'm trying to quit getting high on people. It's really fucking hard. I'm a romantic and an addict. I crave eros, fantasy, and intrigue. I'm wired for longing. But I keep getting really sick. Longing-sick. When you keep getting sick, you start to get tired of it. Eventually, you might be like: This…

I n the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter…

In 2012, Kim Stanley Robinson published 2312 , imagining how the world and its neighbors might look in 300 years, loosely coupled with the seminal Red Mars books, a futuristically pastoral novel about the way that technology can celebrate the glories of nature; in 2015, Robinson followed it up with…

Ringer illustration It’s impossible to spoil last night’s Season 4 finale of The Americans — nothing that shocking and traumatic occurred, and anyway, if you’re a sackcloth-shoulder-pads-wearing devotee of FX’s Cold War superspy drama, you’ve doubtless already rewatched it twice already. But the…

(FX/Ringer illustration) “Are you having sex?” asks the undercover Russian spy of her sullen teenage daughter, as they stand in their closed suburban garage. The spy is holding a duct-taped throw pillow so the teenager can sullenly hammer at it with her fists. The unspoken answer is, Not yet, but…

During a New York Times Talk , Jon Stewart gave his most in-depth thoughts yet on a number of topics that his fans wanted him to comment on. The comedian and now-director Stewart weighed in on the division in the country brought on by the election, Donald Trump, the media, and how to move forward.…

Whether lambasting racial inequity with his trademark eccentricity, or putting on a Jheri curl wig for a now-legendary parody of Rick James, Dave Chappelle has long been considered one of the most exciting stand-ups in comedy. But he hasn’t issued a special or album since his infamous decision to…

(Ubisoft) I’ve done things in video games that I would never want to do in life. Just in the last year of my digital existence, I’ve committed innumerable acts of wanton murder ( The Division, Far Cry Primal ), ran my bayonet through the virtual guts of countless online schmucks ( Battlefield 1 ),…

opinion What happens when we lose American lives over a lie? opinion Justin Sullivan/Getty It’s hard to live with a leader you don’t trust. It makes you anxious. Makes you fearful. It’s not really a partisan issue. This president lies as constantly and as brazenly as a used car salesman trying to…

How do businesses let design inform or even lead their strategy? Should every company have their own chief design officer? And what role should design play in today’s way of leadership and organization? More than a dozen C-suite executives and founders gathered to address these questions at an…

This week’s Beauty and the Beast will feature Disney’s first openly gay character — but the excitement that followed director Bill Condon’s announcement quickly turned to frustration on the realization that this character would be Le Fou, Gaston’s bumbling sidekick. Many have asked for years that…

Loading License this image → Follow us on Facebook → Now interactive & filterable, with ten new MythConceptions added. Toggle each category on & off, or hit ‘reset’ for all. To reveal our latest finds, press ‘new’. Bag a copy of the book Knowledge is Beautiful for even more myths and misconceptions.…

Getty The Kremlin wants to destroy the trans-Atlantic alliance. Does Trump want to save it? When Angela Merkel meets with Donald Trump on Friday, she won’t just be representing Germany. She’ll be bringing all the hopes and anxieties of an anxious continent—one whose fears have been stoked by the…

Brian Rea More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes. Let…

Emma Watson is Belle and Dan Stevens is the Beast in Bill Condon’s movie. Illustration by Malika Favre To say that the latest Disney production, “Beauty and the Beast,” is offering something brand-new would be wide of the mark. A scholarly paper published last year presented “phylogenetic analyses”…

WASHINGTON — Near the end of his meticulously formal, utterly impersonal news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Trump finally sought a sliver of common ground with his guest: They both, he said, had been wiretapped by former President Barack Obama. Ms. Merkel did a barely…

To understand the thinking of American presidents, historians, contemporaries, and political rivals, have often sought out the texts that most influenced them. George Washington, for example, was known to love Cato: A Tragedy , Joseph Addison’s civics-heavy play about the man who tried and failed to…

In 2008, the George W. Bush administration, which had started building about 670 miles of border fencing on mostly federally owned land in Arizona, California and New Mexico under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, tried to seize an acre or so in Cameron County, Tex., that belonged to Eloisa Tamez.…

Ian Grushinski grieves by a piece of the wreckage at a plane crash site near Smolensk, western Russia. (Mikhail Metzel/Associated Press) It’s important to acknowledge when you’ve been wrong, and I’ve probably never been so wrong as I was in an op-ed published on April 13, 2010. At the time, I was…

At the start of Jehoiakim’s reign, the prophet Jere­miah lumbered into the temple square and issued a blistering prophecy about God’s coming justice. God had instructed him to “not hold back a word,” and Jeremiah obeyed. “Repent or be destroyed!” he cried. His speech came at a price. He was nearly…

Photo: Wikipedia The classic arcade cabinet will soon be all but extinct. The niche market of manufacturing CRT televisions has officially hit a wall and the experience of playing a classic arcade game as it was originally intended will be a very rare thing in the near future. Dream Arcades Wants To…

photo credit: freepik The explosion of prototyping tools in the past few years has given designers an opportunity to create detailed interactions. Designers are spending hours and days learning these tools. However, many designers get lost in the technical details of the prototyping tool of choice.…

Jacob and Joe Weisberg. Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images/Patrick McMulllan The A mericans tells the story of a Russian espionage operation so mind-boggling it seems absurd — or at least it did until, well, you know . The show, which stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Elizabeth and Philip…

Tickled The most frustrating thing about David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s 2016 documentary Tickled is that it has no real resolution. Although the pair of New Zealand filmmakers ultimately made contact with David D’Amato, the strange, reclusive man responsible for publishing hundreds of “competitive…

“This is as good as it gets.” Six years ago, El-P was authoring “ Drones Over Brooklyn ”—a disturbingly accurate depiction of how 2017 has unfolded so far. The native New Yorker embodies a pessimistic world view that seeps into his music—“ We all dead, fuck it! ” is among his most memorable quotes…