MusicFeature To celebrate the Icelandic star’s 50th birthday, we trace all the times she graced us with her ever-evolving presence – all the way back to 1995 21 November 2015 Text Amy Newson Our favourite Icelandic songstress is turning 50. Quite unbelievable really, as it feels like only yesterday…

We are at the point in Donald Trump’s campaign when it’s difficult to decide whether to focus on his unconstitutional policy proposals or his blatant lies. I mean, this is just from yesterday: Quite a news day for @realDonaldTrump . pic.twitter.com/K4EWCjuR4Q — ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) November 22,…

Nick Cannon in "Chi-Raq." | Roadside Attractions/Amazon Studios This just in: Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” isn’t a broad comedy that makes light of the tragic levels of violence in Englewood, nor is it a gratuitous slam at our great city. It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down…

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave thousands of supporters a heaping dose of red-meat at his Monday evening stop in Atlanta. But the Democratic presidential candidate was rivaled by the man who introduced him: Rapper Killer Mike. The two lunched together at the Busy Bee before the hip-hop star - real…

T here were a lot of tributes after the horror in Paris . It has to be said that Trafalgar Square is an odd choice of venue to show solidarity with France; presumably Waterloo was too busy. One of the most appropriate tributes was Adele dedicating Hometown Glory to Paris, just as the raids on…

Paul Hollywood, Sue Perkins, Mel Giedroyc and Mary Berry with 2015’s Bake Off contestants.Photograph: Mark Bourdillon/BBC/Love Productions/Mark Bourdillon T he season finale of The Great British Bake Off was the third most popular programme on television last year – outflanked only by two World Cup…

Phil Toledano I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without…

“He’s gotta convince people that three Bushes are not one too many,” one rival says. Illustration by André Carrilho On Friday, October 2nd, Jeb Bush was onstage at a college auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, for a public interview with Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general and a…

Right now, we’re in a car, hanging on for dear life as we hurtle around a mountain bend. If we don’t hit the brakes soon, we’re going to lose control, crash through the guardrail, and careen into the abyss. We’ve been fully warned about the danger ahead, but now here we are, testing our fate.…

AP Photo An Islamic State flag in Sadiyah, Iraq, November 2014 The shock produced by the multiple coordinated attacks in Paris on Friday—the scenes of indiscriminate bloodshed and terror on the streets, the outrage against Islamic extremism among the public, French President Francois Holland’s vow…

On the night of the Paris attacks, Rurik Bradbury noticed an inevitable and tiresome trend popping up on Twitter. “I think I saw a professional news organization tweet about the lights of the Eiffel Tower being turned off in memory of the victims,” recalled Bradbury, the New York-based CMO of a…

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American…

Enlarge Reality is mutable, vulnerable to interpretation and interference. It’s an idea that permeates through Philip K. Dick’s writing, one of the most influential forces in pop culture. Even if you don’t recognise his work by name, chances are you’ve experienced its impact. Minority Report , Blade…

Hanover, N.H. — SURVEYING the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris, most Americans probably feel despair, and a presentiment that it is only a matter of time before something similar happens here. Even as Americans have felt the pain of the French, they have worried, not surprisingly,…

‘There is discernible method in the Isis approach.’ Islamic State fighters in Raqqa.Photograph: AP I t’s “the first of the storm”, says Islamic State . And little wonder. For the chaotic scenes on the streets of Paris and the fearful reaction those attacks provoked are precisely what Isis planned…

For John Chase, the breaking point came on Jan. 7, when al Qaeda-linked militants gunned down 12 people at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo . Subsequent attacks by a gunman affiliated with the Islamic State would take five more lives. Watching triumphant jihadi messages bounce across Twitter, the…

The first level in Call of Duty: Black Ops III is about torture. As a Special Forces soldier in a grim future, the player is to extract a political official from a secret prison. As you infiltrate the facility, the game showcases gruesome scenes of waterboarding, beatings, and a unfortunate souls…

A member loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) waves an ISIS flag in Raqqa. (Reuters / Stringer) No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I…

A former staff writer describes how a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency failed its female employees. The following story — on the treatment of female editors, writers, and managers at Gawker Media — was scheduled to appear on Gawker.com on Friday, November 13. It had…

Photographs by Inez + Vinoodh The leader of the free world sits down with the free agent of the year—HBO’s Bill Simmons—to discuss the Obama era and beyond. The exclusive White House Q&A There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the…

Kathleen Kennedy has heard a lot of movie pitches. For decades she worked with Steven Spielberg, producing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , the Indiana Jones series, the Jurassic Park series. You get the picture. So it probably wasn’t a surprise—it was cool, even—when, right after Kennedy took over as…

C olin Trevorrow’s Hollywood fairy tale started at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The bespectacled, bearded director, then 35, came to Park City, Utah, with an endearingly quirky time-travel romantic comedy executive-produced by the endearingly quirky Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, and…

F rom six in the morning until five in the afternoon, five days a week, for thirty years, my Grandmama Catherine’s fingers, palms, and wrists wandered deep in the bellies of dead chickens. Grandmama was a buttonhole slicer at a chicken plant in central Mississippi—her job was to slice the belly and…

The independent video store where I've worked for 15 years is finally dead. After 28 years in business, we succumbed to the "disruption" of Netflix and Hulu, bled to death by the long, slow defection of our customer base. Once we announced our closing, the few who remained mourned — then we locked…

Rick Majewski/ZUMA Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. In a fiery speech at Georgetown University outlining and defending democratic socialism on Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, went off script from his prepared…

John Rowley / Ocean / Corbis A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten…

words by Eamon Whalen photo by bfreshproductions The first thing to know about Bones and Beeker is that they were never supposed to exist. “We weren’t even trying to be a band!” says lead singer and guitarist, Tony Newes, as he sips a beer in the band’s practice space, the garage of his south…

A dele just told the world she won’t be streaming her new album. It comes out tomorrow. And I’ll never listen to it. Never mind the fact that I bought her last album on vinyl. Never mind the fact I think she’s a fantastic musician, worthy of all her praise (regardless of her self-indulgence). Never…

Other streaming services should be worried W ith ever-shiner new music services rolling out on a regular basis, it was easy to forget about Pandora, the old warhorse that’s been in the game forever. It’s a public company, and, well, just not a very sexy one. This is not to diss anyone I know who…

An illustration inspired by "The Nightman Cometh" episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' If you've never watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia , you should. Hey, maybe you already have and I'm just being presumptuous and condescending – but if you live in the UK and don't have Netflix,…

Facebook The world’s most iconic monuments, awash in blue and white and red . Human faces, replaced with the stark black and white of Jullien’​s Eiffel Tower . French flags, filtered over photos. Hashtags. Emoji. #Parisjetaime . #J esuisparis . People, this weekend, grasped for ways—ways that were…

President-elect Barack Obama is welcomed by President George W. Bush for a meeting at the White House in Washington on Jan. 7, 2009, with former presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP) Yes, you read that headline correctly. In a new poll released by the…

It’s easy to forget now, but the first modern music streaming service to arrive in America was Rdio. Like its founders, Skype billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, Rdio was awkwardly spelled and a little hard to pronounce. When it arrived in August 2010, the smartphone era was young enough…

You've seen them all over your Facebook feed — profile pictures with the French flag, showing support after Friday's attacks in Paris that left 129 dead. You might have changed your picture, too. The small gesture makes us all feel united in the face of such tragedy. We even wrote a story that…

If you’ve been on Facebook since last Friday’s attacks in Paris, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into the Front National’s image bank – the social media site is currently hosting a flood of French flags, applied via a function enabled by Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the…

Emergency personnel remove a body from the site of a twin suicide blasts in Burj al Barajinah in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Nov. 12, 2015. (Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images) BEIRUT — Hezbollah militiamen were on high alert Friday after twin suicide bombings left dozens dead and raised fears of…

The jihadist group attacks a Hizbullah stronghold FOR all its proximity to and intertwinement with Syria, Lebanon has hitherto remained relatively untouched by Islamic State (IS). The jihadists, who have claimed responsibility for attacks from Saudi Arabia to Libya, have never claimed an attack in…

After a series of terrorist attacks in Paris left the internet-commenting world in a state of public shock and grieving, software CMO Rurik Bradbury took note of one particular myth that was making the viral rounds: that the Eiffel Tower had gone dark in tribute, instead of as it always did at 1…