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.…

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…