“A drug-free world: we can do it.” So ran the optimistic slogan of the UN General Assembly’s last special session ( UNGASS ) on drug policy, in 1998. Eighteen years on, the world is further than ever from being drug-free. Cannabis and cocaine consumption have risen by half, opiate use has nearly…

Before delving into the Sisyphean task of putting together the 100 theater roadshow and some of with individual 70mm screenings you’ve been reading about, it’s important to first remember that while the ability to shoot on film might have from near death, the battle between digital and film…

IT’S time for my annual holiday gift guide, the chance to recommend presents more meaningful than a tie or sweater. For $20, through Heifer International ( heifer.org ), you can buy a flock of ducks and help a family work its way to a better life. Or $74 through CARE ( care.org ) pays for a…

Game Developers Matt Trobbiani and Chris Johnson are best friends. They do everything together. They grew up together. They did a Computer Science degree together. They made video games together, released video games together. But when Matt released Hacknet and Chris Johnson released Expand ,…

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola appeared at a “protected by an army of [his] kids.” At the event, he offered his thoughts on Nietzsche, personal films and also foretold the future of film. The iconic filmmaker said then: “Cinema as we know it is going to radically change. I see twelve cameras over…

“This is the most Kubrickian room,” Lin-Manuel Miranda said the other night, sweeping into the seventh floor of the New Museum, on the Bowery. The room was long, very white, with two glass walls, facing south and east, and in a corner was a curved white leather couch, to which Miranda led his party.…

Donald Trump at a rally in Hampton. Throughout this story, GOP candidates are shown on the stump in the Granite State last summer and fall, in photographs shot for the The Atlantic and New Hampshire magazine. Mark Ostow / New Hampshire magazine / The Atlantic The angriest and most pessimistic people…

Quentin Tarantino directs Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Samuel L. Jackson. Illustration by Zohar Lazar Combine two films released on Christmas Day, Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant,” and what have you got? Five hours and thirty-eight…

The page view is a zombie. For years , everyone has been saying it is no longer a meaningful way to measure online popularity. But the publishers who make websites and the advertisers who pay for them swore throughout the year that they’re no longer fooled. The era where a mere click is the crown…

Jones, who will star in a reboot of “Ghostbusters,” says, “People get hung up on writing smart shit. To me, it’s more about performance.” Photograph by Jonno Rattman for The New Yorker On TV talk shows, the host introduces a guest, then music plays while the guest emerges from backstage. On…

Fabiano Caruana appeared in a photograph in this magazine in 2001, when he was eight. It was raining, and he was wearing an oversized slicker and standing on a park bench. He held an umbrella with one hand and, with the other, reached across a chessboard to make a move in a game against his teacher,…

Editor’s Note: Adam Witmer is a 22-year-old senior at UNC School of the Arts in Winston Salem, North Carolina, where he works in film preservation and as a projectionist at one of the largest film archives in the country. At this very moment he is the projectionist at the AMC Burbank 16 in Los…

In another life, Roselyn Keo might have liked to work on Wall Street. “I’m smart enough, I know,” she told me, sitting in the immaculate white kitchen of her suburban home. She’s organized, she pointed out, and good at math, and there is little doubt she has an entrepreneurial streak. As a kid, she…

This is a column where James Franco talks to his reverse self, Semaj, about new films. Rather than a conventional review , it is a place where James and Semaj can muse about ideas that the films provoke. James loves going to the movies and talking about them, but a one-sided take on a movie, in…

There’s suddenly a storm of outburts about a week-old interview that George Lucas had with Charlie Rose. It’s the one where he compared selling Lucasfilm to Disney as selling his children to “ white slavers .” This was a stupid thing to say, but not really a new note for Lucas to hit. There’s been…

W hen I called Killer Mike he was at Hartsfield-Jackson International, about to leave for England, where his rap duo, Run the Jewels, would be performing for a crowd of 175,000 at the iconic Glastonbury Festival. It was 8:15 P.M . on a Wednesday in June, and I wanted to ask him what it’s like to be…

December 29, 2015 Vocal artist rights advocate David Lowery brings a massive action against the largest streaming service. Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery, retaining the law firm of Michelman & Robinson, LLP, has filed a class action lawsuit seeking at least $150 million in…

YET again a story has surfaced of an airline trying to get approval for a standing section on a plane. Previously the idea was mooted by Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair—although that was probably more attention-seeking than serious proposal. Now reports suggest that Spring Airlines, a Chinese…

This year, in lieu of the traditional Best Of Lists, we thought it would be fun to throw our editors and writers into a draft together and have a conversation. Here are Nilay Patel and Casey Newton discussing the hopes and many anxieties felt by the media as their industry becomes increasingly…

Steve Carell. Stephen Colbert. Louis C.K. Charlie Kaufman. Robert Smigel. Some of comedy's greatest minds got one of their biggest breaks on the short-lived but much-loved "The Dana Carvey Show." Fifteen years later, in this exclusive oral history, the players recount the brief but fertile life of a…

So, let’s talk about Cobra Club , the dick pic simulator by Robert Yang, for a little bit. Because the content of the game is NSFW — and because I’m going to spoil some of the game’s stuff — you can find the rest of this post under the fold. I’m always in a weird place when it comes to Robert’s…

The Arcade is undergoing a facelift and will be available soon!

Adele’s single is the musical equivalent of the desire for experiential homogeneity that Trump satisfies AS 2015 draws to a close, among the two biggest US media spectacles that are not mass shootings are Adele’s single “Hello” and presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stump speeches. As of December…

Earlier this year, in the midst of reading over some statistics about how violent imagery in games affects players, I found myself wondering how they affect the people who make them. We regularly celebrate the artists and animators who pepper games with the lovely and the magnificent; I rarely hear…

On Christmas Day, I fulfilled my duty as an American consumer and took the family to see the new "Star Wars" movie. The excursion solved a mystery: Why do so many of the reviews, even the enthusiastic ones, carry an undertone of disappointment? The simple answer is that "Star Wars: The Force…

Photo: Amanda Demme Plus: Co-Director Duke Johnson on Making Anomalisa Anatomically Correct By Phoebe Reilly Is it weird for me to say that Anomalisa contains the most realistic sex scene I’ve ever seen in a movie? Given that it’s happening between puppets? It’s not weird. Almost everybody we speak…

Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. For more from Economist Radio visit soundcloud.com/theeconomist A full transcript of the telephone interview is available below. The questions are lightly edited for clarity. The Economist: What are Trump…

Some students at Oberlin College are taking their demands for diversity and racial inclusion to the dining hall, asking for more traditional meals and criticizing what they consider poor efforts at multicultural cooking. It is the latest skirmish in a year marked by protests and other actions by…

IN 2003 Peter Morley-Souter, a British teenager whose hobby was drawing comic strips with his sister Rose, was sent a parody of “Calvin and Hobbes”, a strip about a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger, by a friend. It showed the titular pair having sex with Calvin’s mother. Mr Morley-Souter…

In July of 2014, the official Twitter account for Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams’ production company tweeted a shot of an IMAX camera preparing to film a scene in 70mm for Star Wars: The Force Awakens . This was part of a planned showstopper chase sequence where Rey, Finn, and BB-8 find themselves at the…

IT WAS 2012, and Fabian Thylmann’s goal was world domination. The man who had put together Manwin, an emerging online-pornography giant, now controlled most of the top ten porn “tubes”—aggregators that, like YouTube, contain thousands of videos and are wildly popular, because much of their content…

All I need is a mattress on the floor and a wifi connection. And my bike. Also, I could use some cheap beer. Do you sell beer any cheaper than this? All I want out of life is to spend time with my friends every day. And to be able to travel, to have enough free time to work on projects, to stay…

IN THE 1990s, when the internet was for nerds, as many as half of all web searches were for sexually explicit material. That share has fallen—but only because everything from home-buying to job-hunting has moved online. Pornography still accounts for more than a tenth of all searches. The number of…

THE 2016 election is going to be about competence, not a test of “niceness”, Donald Trump growls down the telephone. Judging by his vision of America’s place in the world, he means what he says. Mr Trump’s lead in the contest for the Republican nomination is due in large part to the rage felt by his…

If we had access to some grand compendium filled with every single emotion that videogames make us feel, it would probably waste most of its words trying to describe fun. But as a concept, fun is primitive. Fun is escape. Like a dog chasing a tennis ball or a crow sliding down a tin roof, fun is…

IN GERMANY, as in the rest of Europe, copyright expires seven decades after the author’s year of death. That applies even when the author is Adolf Hitler and the work is “Mein Kampf”. Since 1945, the state of Bavaria has owned the book’s German-language rights and has refused to allow its…

DONALD TRUMP is not going to be America’s next president. The vagaries of the electoral college notwithstanding, the next occupant of the Oval Office will be someone who wins a lion’s share of the 130m or so ballots cast in November next year. And though Mr Trump has spent weeks leading the field of…

“THIS country is a hellhole. We are going down fast,” says Donald Trump. “We can’t do anything right. We’re a laughing-stock all over the world. The American dream is dead.” It is a dismal prospect, but fear not: a solution is at hand. “I went to the Wharton School of Business. I’m, like, a really…

Andrew Cooper/The Weinstein Company Quentin Tarantino is infamous for mining cinema’s forgotten past—be it spaghetti westerns, kung fu flicks, or blaxploitation movies. But with his latest, the post–Civil War western The Hateful Eight , the director is taking his retro-mania to a whole new level.…