Arts+CultureFeature Women’s use of vibrators and other sex toys is often celebrated as a sign of sexual liberation. But why can’t the same be said for men? 22 December 2015 Text Leonie Roderick While it’s generally acceptable for women to own a plethora of vibrators, dildos and other toys to get…

December 21, 2015 Vancouver filmmakers bring narrative storytelling to Vine Sabrina Furminger — Westender Tyler Funk brought 'White Ninja' to (new) life on Vine. — Contributed photo Six episodes of White Ninja were available for viewing by the time I interviewed one of its creators – and I was able…

March 16, 2018 John Moore/Getty Images Last year, more than 964 million people boarded airplanes departing or arriving within the United States. Barring any special security clearance, virtually all of them were filtered through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a federally operated…

Traveling the world for the chance of an upgrade. Photo: Jason Alden/Getty Images Even on the spectrum of Problems That Aren’t Really Problems, having to fly to London for a weekend just to rack up frequent-flier miles is preposterous — the kind of behavior that will be cited, in some…

The author (top left; center; bottom right) and others in stills from “Hysterical Literature.” Video stills by Clayton Cubitt. I’m in the backseat of a car on my way to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on a beautiful spring day to meet two people I have never met, and to take part in a most unlikely…

Lucas MacFadden (better known as Cut Chemist) found his life's passion at an early age when we began dj'ing at 11 years old. He is best known as a founding member of both Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli. Fueled by the desire to define the essence of hip-hop and share cultural education, Cut Chemist has…

“For God’s sake, sex and auto-insurance are not two things that go together.” ~ Kristin Brewe, creator of Erin Esurance If you watched TV in the mid-2000s, you probably saw Erin Esurance. Fitted in a leather catsuit and sporting a spunky pink haircut, the 2D-animated secret agent navigated her way…

[Read more about Jimmy Z & NWA – NWA – Straight Outta Compton… then Torrance & Westlake ] Doing some house cleaning recently, I came across this legal document signed by both Eazy E (Eric Wright) and myself, Jimmy Z (James Zavala). It is a release from my contract with Eazy’s company Ruthless…

The legendary gangster rapper Eazy-E was a visionary, and his Ruthless Records was one of the strangest rap labels ever. In the late 1980s, Ruthless maintained a small roster of artists, headlined by N.W.A., the D.O.C., and Above the Law. This all changed when a near-fatal car accident in 1989…

I’ve finallywatched The Force Awakens a couple ofdays after it opened, and I have thoughts about it. Plenty of thoughts. As alifelong Star Wars fan, one who firstsaw A New Hope in my infancy(apparently I was fine until the cantina scene, at which point I lost it and myparents had to take me out of…

This review was first posted on Kitbashed . This is a review, and it contains spoilers. Because a spoiler-free review is pointless. I highly recommend that you do not read this if you haven’t seen The Force Awakens . I’m not sure I recommend it even if you watched the film. Since the credits…

Let’s get this out of the way: Spoiler Warning. Now that’s done: As simply good filmmaking with verve and spark, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a significant bump up from J.J. Abrams’ recent directorial attempts. He produces a ton of stuff, but keep in mind the last two movies he actually directed…

For National Review’s 60th anniversary issue last month, instead of my usual movie review I did a short piece on what “Back to the Future” day — the arrival of the date, 10/21/2015, to which Marty McFly leaps forward from the Reagan ’80s in “Back to the Future 2″ — tells us about decadence. Not the…

Let me clarify: I don’t actually hate Star Wars: The Force Awakens . I watched the movie three times in four days, and will surely see at least twice more before it leaves theaters. But even though I love the movie, there is one major aspect of it that distresses me immensely. Major spoilers…

I met up with deadmau5 at a club in Ottawa during the 2012 JUNO Awards. I was tagging along as his guest, expecting a wild night of partying following a big televised performance where he closed out the award show. However, after 20 minutes in the club, I got a nudge on my shoulder and a "let's get…

In a fancy office block in Moscow, dozens of bright young Russians are designing artwork to glorify Vladimir Putin. One poster asks: “What does Superman dream of?” It shows the Man of Steel asleep wearing Putin pyjamas. Russian propaganda is as good a guide as any to Mr Putin’s aims. To distract his…

An oil drilling rig in Norway. gigishots/Getty Images/iStockphoto When oil was discovered in the Norwegian continental shelf in 1969, Norway was very aware of the finite nature of petroleum, and didn't waste any time legislating policies to manage the new-found resource in a way that would give…

The money poured in by the millions, then by the hundreds of millions, and finally by the billions. Over weak coffee in a conference room in Midtown Manhattan last year, a half-dozen Puerto Rican officials exhaled: Their cash-starved island had persuaded some of the country’s biggest hedge funds to…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

AT A former Hershey’s chocolate factory just outside Ottawa a company called Tweed now produces a rather different confection: marijuana for Canada’s tightly regulated medical market. Under the gaze of surveillance cameras, scientists in lab coats concoct new cannabis-based blends in near-sterile…

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen? The answer is: lots of people, because we’re all different and some of us haven’t even read Pride and Prejudice…

Preface: I replied to the Inverse Pitch for this story thinking I was interested in seeing if it was actually difficult to buy a gun in California. TL;DR: It is, sort of. The editors got back to me on the day of the Oregon shooting . I got assigned my editor for this story about 12 hours after…

O n a recent Thursday afternoon, fifteen hundred teenagers gather outside a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan to get a glimpse of Felix Kjellberg, the 26-year-old YouTube sensation better known as PewDiePie. A 21-year-old girl with bleached blonde hair tells me she arrived in New York at 4 a.m., after…

George Hotz is taking on Google and Tesla by himself. A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been working on. He says it’s a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. The claim seems absurd.…

AS AUDIENCES left the premiere of the new Star Wars film, “The Force Awakens”, in Los Angeles on December 14th, its last image still alive in their imaginations, it became obvious that the hit of the year had arrived. Those at the screening saw plenty that is familiar from the original three…

But it is not clear what deal David Cameron can get, nor that British voters will back him when he gets one IT WAS described as a “make-or-break” moment for Britain and the European Union. Yet, on the face of it, little happened at last night’s summit of EU leaders to advance Britain’s renegotiation…

The EU faces many crises. One of them is unlike all the rest LIKE blows from a fearsome heavyweight, the crises keep raining down upon Europe’s battered brow. Refugees, terrorism, Syria, Russia, Greece and Britain’s threat to quit the European Union: collectively they have left the EU punch-drunk…

FOR anyone unsure what sort of an event was about to unfold in Robarts Arena, in sunny Sarasota, on November 28th, the elephant was a clue. It stood meekly outside the entrance, a long-suffering fairground veteran, with “Trump: Make America Great Again” chalked on its flank. Had the thousands of…

An aerial view of the ‘‘prow’’ of Mount Roraima, one of the most spectacular tepuis , or mesas, in Canaima National Park. George Steinmetz for The New York Times Video by George Steinmetz version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? Visual journeys by six photographers 1 Nigeria 2 Black Sea 3 Tokyo 4 Venezuela 5…

YouNow’s 5quad: Timmy Connors, Rudan Custodido, Edwin Burgos, Nick Bean, and Zach Clayton. Photo by Jordan Tugrul/Tha Lights Photography Zach Clayton, 15, is the most famous person on a social network most people have never heard of. In the summer of 2014, Zach created an account on YouNow , an app…

Most people get porn for free—but feminist filmmakers are hoping to change that. Photo by taxcredits.com . If you’re a progressive middle-class individual, chances are you think about where your food comes from. Maybe you try to buy shoes that are ethically made and do research on who grew your…

In “ Sisters ,” Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play adult siblings who decide to throw one last wild teenage-style bash in their childhood home. (Cue the dance-offs and cannonballs into the pool.) In real life, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler have been to decades of parties together, from wrap nights at “Saturday…

Working on the deck composition for Secret Hitler. (This is essay is part one in a series. You can read part two here .) Hi everyone! I’m Tommy Maranges , one of the designers/creators of Secret Hitler , which is a social deduction game that we are funding on Kickstarter right now. As the wonkiest…

Secret Hitler is a hidden-identity game I helped create, and you can get it right now on Kickstarter . For the last week, to give people a sense of what it’s like to play, we’ve been streaming it live on Twitch.TV. If you’ve been watching the Twitch streams, you know that games of Secret Hitler can…

Who can honestly say that they don't use drugs? I'm not necessarily talking about illegal drugs, like marijuana or psychedelics. Alcohol is a drug. Nicotine is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Aspirin is a drug. Many kids are on Adderall and many parents [and grandparents ;) ] take Viagra. There are…

Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always…

Photo by SDPD When porn star and feminist activist Stoya tweeted on November 28th that she had been sexually assaulted by fellow star James Deen , the porn-watching world gasped in collective horror. Deen, Stoya’s ex-boyfriend, has in recent years rocketed to fame because of his seemingly…

Jessica Jones hates the sinister Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one? Illustration by Tomer Hanuka “I promise that I won’t touch you until I get your genuine consent,” the sinister Kilgrave (David Tennant) announces, on “Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” the…

Photo by Andrey_Popov /Shutterstock, with additional illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker Watching someone sleep is intimate and a little creepy. In movies and television, when people wake up to discover they are being stared at, they rear their heads back, cover up their morning breath, and giggle…

“You can never think too big”. So proclaims the dusty sign outside a hangar in America’s Mojave desert where boffins are building the Stratolaunch, the world’s biggest aircraft, due for its maiden test flight in 2016. It could be a fitting slogan for a year in which the world’s biggest battery…