Will Smith, left, and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Oscars in 2014. Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated Press When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled 20 all-white acting nominees this month, the furor was immediate. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, created last year, returned in…

INVESTORS often start the calendar year in a buoyant mood, only to be caught out by unexpected events. It is almost inevitable that the consensus will be proved wrong in some respects, not least because the views of most investors will already be reflected in market prices. So this column would like…

STERLING has had a very choppy history, marked by crises such as 1967, 1976 and 1992. And it is having another rocky period. John Wraith of UBS writes that Of the many violent recent moves in global markets, the collapse of sterling is one of the most remarkable. In trade weighted terms, the…

Craig Mod For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common…

Much has been made of the IAB’s decision to ban Adblock Plus from attending their annual summit. But honestly, can you blame them? The IAB isn’t a governing body. It’s a trade association that lobbies on behalf of its members. And its members tend to be online publishers and agencies that have been…

Thomas Timlen / Flickr The first World War transformed, along with so much else, the way people mourn. The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argues that the death of so many people in such a small span of time overwhelmed those they left behind, and rendered them unable to undergo the rituals…

This is part one of a three-part series on Uber. Read parts two and three . A memo to the mayors of Canada's biggest cities: Uber, whether you like it or not, is going to win. Don't agree? Talk to your counterparts in New York, Chicago, Portland and more than 350 other cities around the world. In…

This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames , in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise. In this edition, he looks at the most recent addition to the legendary first-person-shooter series, DOOM. I know DOOM has a contingent of fans and critics who…

Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show in September. Photo illustration by Holly Allen. Photos by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images, and Brad Barket/Comedy Central. In mid-January, with Bernie Sanders surging in the polls in Iowa, The Daily Show With Trevor Noah decided it was time to formally introduce…

Cinematographer Roger Deakins is enjoying the afterglow of his 13th Oscar nomination, for “Sicario.” But in the meantime, he has another film heading to theaters next week: Joel and Ethan Coen ’s “Hail, Caesar!” It’s notable because it’s the first project Deakins has shot on film since the last time…

The dream of a centrist third-party presidential candidate will never die . Michael Bloomberg, the media billionaire and former New York City mayor, is once again considering running for president, but how broad is his appeal? Although he may wish to portray himself as a centrist alternative to more…

During the early aughts, when I was bobbing about the murky shark tank of my mid-20s, there were several years when my income was derived entirely from standing in a silver unitard around NYC. I started out in the subway after getting fired from my Santa Claus job at Saks Fifth Avenue (the result of…

The social media movement #OscarsSoWhite definitely has a point. Once again the Academy has ignored the few strong contributions that black people were able to make to the overwhelmingly white film industry. F. Gary Gray's Straight Out of Compton is good enough to deserve a Best Picture nomination.…

After the Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina last weekend, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was represented by none other than Killer Mike . While it's pretty standard for campaigns to send proxies in to wrangle reporters, those proxies usually don't include a a self-described…

by Share: Roger Deakins has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography 13 times without a single win. This ties him with George J. Folsey, shooter of such classics as MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS, and ADAM’S RIB, as the D.o.P. with the most nods but no gold…

This is part two of a three-part series. Read parts one and three . What do Kate Upton, Brett Wilson and a unicycle-riding musician playing fire-breathing bagpipes behind a Darth Vader mask have in common? They've all been enlisted by Uber in its ongoing fight to win hearts and minds in cities…

This is part three of a three-part series on Uber. Read parts one and two . Outraged taxi drivers the world over telling anyone who will listen that Uber is the devil in corporate form makes it tough, even for those so inclined, to blithely accept at face value the company's argument that it's just…

Jim Cramer, who coined the “FANG” acronym as a descriptor for the high-flying F acebook, A mazon, N etflix, and G oogle group of tech stocks that have dramatically outperformed the market, made clear yesterday that his endorsement wasn’t necessarily connected to the underlying companies: A note on…

In 1998, Donald Trump told People Magazine “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country.” That’s the meme, accompanied by the graphic at right. Rosemary Olsen posted it on Facebook and said “I fact checked this. It’s true.” 14,901 people shared it.…

Download Listen to “In Conversation: Miranda July & Jennifer Brandel” What Miranda July Can Teach (& Remind) Us About Making Media for the Public Admittedly, I over prepared for this interview. Beyond spending many evenings researching and thinking, I also hijacked every one of my hangouts with…

Marie Staver couldn't sleep. Always plagued by insomnia and other sleep disorders, in college she was struggling to get enough rest to keep up with her heavy workload. So in 1998 she made a drastic decision: she would stop trying. Instead of lying in bed all night, she would get her rest in catnaps…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. In early 2012, on a visit to San Francisco, Shannon Liss-Riordan went to a restaurant with some friends. Over dinner, one of her companions began to describe a new car-hailing app that had taken Silicon Valley by storm. “Have you…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell “You don’t consider yourself a capitalist?” Anderson Cooper, of CNN, asked Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, in October, at the first Democratic Presidential debate. Sanders gave a look suggesting that Cooper had just asked him to put on a black-silk top hat and play…

We might soon find ourselves so overworked that sleep itself becomes the most sought-after drug on the market. As part of You'll Sleep When You're Dead , the inimitable Warren Ellis brings us tomorrow's world of killer sleep machines and distant lucid dreams. -the Eds "I have lived long enough for…

IN OCTOBER 2013 the Seaman Guard Ohio , a Sierra Leone-flagged ship, was intercepted just under 11 nautical miles off the coast of India by the local coastguard. The grey-hulled vessel looked like a naval ship—bristling with antennae and radar—but was chartered by AdvanFort, a private security firm…

So it's Friday morning and I have an interview scheduled for 10 a.m. with Scott Thompson. He's an icon of Canadian comedy especially for someone my age who grew up as the comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall was skyrocketing in popularity. My interview was to be about his upcoming stand up show in…

So yesterday, as I was leaving the gym to do my show at SiriusXM (The Spectrum! Channel 28! Let me give you the Mumford and Hozier you deserve!), I noticed a voicemail from an unfamiliar Maryland phone number… Anyway, the whole thing is below. And here's an exclusive postscript: [SPOILER ALERT] I…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. If you drive out to visit Disney’s Epcot center in Orlando, Florida, you will arrive at one of the biggest parking lots in America. With room for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out over 7 million square feet—about the size of 122 football…

You’re telling your own story: You graduated college and you’re a grown-ass woman now. Tina Fey is your hero; Beyoncé, your preacher. You know how to take care of you. You’ve learned self-defense. If any man ever hit you, you’d rip his eyes out. You’ve seen Mad Men , and if anyone ever sexually…

Amanda Hess Apr 22, 2009 3 PM Earl plays Photo Hunt at Recessions Earl plays Photo Hunt at Recessions Caught in the headlights: Earl is master of the Hunt. Show Earl a photo of a topless woman, and he’ll respond like most heterosexual men—sure, he’ll take a look at the boobs. Show Earl two photos of…

By Emily Guendelsberger Published: 06/26/2013 | You may be familiar with the game on those touch-screen bar-game consoles that’s colloquially known as Nudie Photo Hunt — in it, players race the clock to spot five differences between two side-by-side, near-identical softcore porn images. The game has…

Erotic Photo Hunt is a gift to drinkers everywhere. Played on a touch-screen console generally mounted to the stickier sort of bar, it's a naughty spin on the sort of "spot the difference" game you may have once played in a Highlights magazine at the pediatrician's office. Two near-identical sexy…

Bye-bye. In the past few months, both my colleague and friend Abraham Riesman and I quit Twitter, washing our hands of that micro-blogging service, which served as a perfect second screen for big-event television, a megaphone for self-promotion, and a platform for the oppressed and the oppressors.…

Audrey Elaine Elrod was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived…

M ark Bowden was watching a ballgame — the Phillies versus the Mets — on the night of May 1, 2011, when the network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of the White House. “Tonight,” the president said, ‘‘I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has…

SOUTHERN TURKEY — Dua had only been working for two months with the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State, when her friends were brought to the station to be whipped. The police had hauled in two women she had known since childhood, a mother and her teenage daughter,…

ONE dodgy referendum lost Ukraine Crimea. Another threatens to lose it the European Union. On April 6th the Dutch public will vote on the “association agreement” the EU signed with Ukraine in 2014. The deal cements trade and political links with one of the EU’s most important neighbours; the…

In the first half of this essay I examined the aesthetic strategies of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as expressing a documentarian style and commenting on our relation to images . I also analyzed the Shanghai setting and linked it to an exteriorization of the characters’ troubled psyches. I continue my…