Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal. I’m a professional YouTube creator. Some people think that this is some kind of joke but I have 30 employees. All of them work in the online video industry, about…

Fisher Stevens was cooking dinner when I got him on the phone. I had wanted to talk to him for years because, as I recount in my new Netflix series, “Master of None,” this actor played a strange role in my relationship to television and film. The first time I saw an Indian character in an American…

O ne of the fascinating things about Edward Snowden’s sudden appearance a little more than two years ago was the inability of many people to comprehend why a young man might give up on the recipe for happiness — high wages, secure job, Hawaiian home — to become the world’s most sought-after…

Could this gentle painting teacher have posthumously inspired a generation of gamers to try art? Every 80s baby remembers Bob Ross, the gentle-voiced art instructor whose public television show brought "happy trees" and "almighty mountains" to life before your eyes, often using nothing more than a…

If you're a sample-based artist and you're feeling paranoid, you're not paranoid at all. The larger music industry really does view you as a menace, the threat of a lawsuit is a constantly hovering guillotine, RIAA lawyers routinely deny that fair use even exists at all, and nearly every day we hear…

Beyond AdventureGaming Team Fortress 2 isn't the only game to take humor out of the adventure gaming genre "safe"zone and make it work elsewhere; Codemasters' Overlord series -- a twisted take on Nintendo's adorable Pikmin -- has become one of the secretlyfunny franchises not sold primarily on its…

In this reprint from the August 2000 issue of Game Developer magazine, Derek Sanderson warns of injokes and pop culture references spoiling the timelessness of your game. We spend years, and millions of dollars, developing games. We spend thousands of hours writing and optimizing our code, thousands…

Page 1 of 2 Perhaps war never changes, but game development sure does. As Bethesda Softworks braces for the launch of a new Fallout game, it’s worth taking a moment to look back at how the high-profile franchise got its start -- with one game developer, in a room at a California game company, coding…

One of the saddest things in videogame culture is seeing a developer trying to explain the inappropriate wardrobe choices for a fictional female character. The most recent case of this is the character Cortana in Halo 5 . The absurdly convoluted reasoning , the mental gymnastics, and the obvious…

'It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,' The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something. Writer Zak Stone about a tragic family death and the lack of…

Sampling and interpolating has been a part of Hip-Hop since Rap’s first mainstream hit. Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” relied heavily on replayed elements of Chic’s “Good Times” to start a music revolution. However, after late ’80s and early ’90s lawsuits involving acts like Vanilla Ice , Biz…

Let me take you inside my head for a second. It’s Game 5 of the ALDS against Texas. Do or die. Tie game, seventh inning. Two men on. Two outs. I was standing in the on-deck circle when we knocked in the tying run, and the crowd just exploded. Imagine standing there on the field and looking up at…

This past weekend, New York was the site for a listening party for fans of De La Soul who contributed to the group’s historic Kickstarter campaign . Their crowdfunding campaign for their forthcoming album, and t he Anonymous Nobody , raised more than six hundred thousand dollars and as a thank you,…

My 16-month-old son was having a bad day. When he doesn’t sleep in the car, he usually points and babbles his approval of all the wonderful things babies notice that completely escape adult attention. On this afternoon, though, he was teething and hungry, a lethal scenario for an energetic youngster…

Kill Bin Laden. Screenshot of Kill Bin Laden, September 11 Digital Archive This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University , New America , and Slate . On Thursday, Nov. 12, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of the library. For…

It was with a raised eyebrow that I read Complex’s column titled “Why Did Everyone Claim to Enjoy Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly.’” In the midst of his “ Kunta’s Groove Sessions ” run, a couple of stories surfaced suggesting that Lamar was performing in half full arenas to somewhat fan flames…

The New York Times published a piece over the weekend about the political prospects of Bernie Sanders , a politician who apparently does not kiss enough babies : “[Sanders] rarely drops by diners or coffee shops with news cameras in tow, unlike most politicians. He hardly ever kisses babies, aides…

With over 800,000 followers, Essena O’Neill is an Instagram star. But Ms. O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian, recently surprised her fans by abruptly speaking out against social media. Changing her Instagram name to “Social Media Is Not Real Life,” Ms. O’Neill has denounced the artificiality of…

SAN FRANCISCO — Over the last few years, so-called sharing companies like Airbnb and Uber — online platforms that allow strangers to pay one another for a room or a ride — have established footholds in thousands of communities well before local regulators have figured out how to deal with them. Now,…

THE style icon Nan Kempner and Henry B. Platt, the Tiffany & Company chairman, were the society fixtures of 1970s Manhattan when Doubles, a private club in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, first welcomed the city’s elite into its distinctive red space. “When we opened, society was driven by a whole…

Walter Murch is synonymous with sound design . Before he came along, the audience, and much of the industry, took sound for granted; so long as a movie cohered into a polished whole, nobody thought much about the soundscape. Then, in 1979, “ Apocalypse Now ” hit theaters. Not only did it shatter our…

Of all the types of rock music, perhaps the one that is least considered and most overlooked is “college rock.” Like today’s “indie rock,” it was named for the circumstance of its proliferation, rather than some characteristic or aesthetic of the music (such as heavy metal, noise, punk, grind, et…

T he Apple ideology is sleek and clean. It proposes a lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where people — unburdened by the “fuzz” of possessions — are free to chase down every desire. Like a nomad on the Steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern. The room of the modern…

With the vinyl resurgence in full swing, how we store our records should also be considered We may be deep in a much ballyhooed vinyl revival but surprisingly, record cases haven’t seemed to have kept pace. With all these folks buying records again from their local record store Whole Foods, you…

One moment in the third Republican presidential debate encapsulates everything terrible about baby boomers and the way they’ve pillaged the U.S. economy. It came from Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Generation Xer, who offered the standard line — you can hear it from the mouth of almost any American…

Justin Bieber is leaning forward, eyes squeezed shut. “Jesus is God,” booms the pastor Judah Smith, standing before Bieber’s front-row seat in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire hotel. “He’s the relationship and the friendship you’ve been craving your whole life. If you believe that with all of…

It’s dangerous, I suspect, to draw too many lessons from the ignominious end of Grantland, the high-brow sports and culture site that ESPN shuttered this weekend, several months after parting ways with Bill Simmons, the site’s founder and editor-in-chief. Much of what transpired seems to have…

The iconic German filmmaker opens up about his new book, love for the WWE, saving Joaquin Phoenix’s life, and much more. Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times via Getty “I think I’m not one of those people who reinvents himself all the time,” Werner Herzog confided on a recent evening in Los Angeles as he…

Colors are tricky. If you’ve ever brought home a can of paint that you thought was taupe in the store but your partner points out looks “kinda pink” on the wall, you know how frustrating—and unreliable—color perception can be. Color systems like Japan’s TOYO Color Finder or Germany’s HKS Guide help…

In August 1963, Merloyd Lawrence wrote a dispatch in The Atlantic from Barcelona, mentioning many of the city’s cultural landmarks: the merchants on Las Ramblas, the food, and the buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, the “architect laureate of Catalonia.” After a disclaimer noting that many a…

By the end of their dinner at a small Italian restaurant in New York’s West Village, Leah is getting antsy to part ways with her boyfriend Ryan, so that she can go meet up with her boyfriend Jim. It’s not that she means to be rude, it’s just that Jim has been traveling for work, so it’s been a while…

At 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday in January, the massive main dance floor at Berlin’s Berghain is full. Dino Sabatini, an Italian DJ with short dark hair, is playing hard, hypnotic techno to a crowd of shirtless gay men, disheveled dudes in sneakers and tiny women with tiny backpacks. Many of these…

After the image of a Brooklyn student named Vidal captured widespread attention on the Humans of New York blog, he and the photographer, Brandon Stanton, were invited to the White House. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRANDON STANTON. COURTESY ST. MARTIN’S PRESS The most famous photograph from Brandon Stanton’s new…

Photo: Maria Jefferis/Redferns via Getty Images Over the last two decades, Neko Case has circled laps around a few different blocks. She's gone from the small-town fables and old Tacoma roads of her early country albums, like 1997's The Virginian and 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby , to the deeply…

STS-116 astronauts installed part of the space station's main backbone in 2006. NASA In the movie The Martian , a stranded astronaut is able to survive for years in a habitat that NASA originally designed to last 30 days. The movie is fictional, but the premise is not so far from reality: a lot of…

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — During the filming of “By the Sea,” Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt — who play a depressed former dancer and her blocked novelist husband — had a go-to method for lightening an often somber mood on the set. “There were a lot of jokes about how nobody is ever going to want…

If you stay in the game long enough, you eventually have to be called a living legend. The expression is basically meaningless though. It’s like an honorary degree. It has no actual value. Usually, it just means you’re old. But Bill Murray is one of the 8 or 9 people actually deserving of the title,…

The Beatles: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, circa 1964 | Archive Photos/Getty Images GRAMMY-winning producer Danger Mouse draws inspiration from the Fab Four By Danger Mouse I didn’t grow up on the Beatles. In fact, by the time I got to college I couldn’t have named…

A way of experiencing music that simply can’t be accomplished via digital means I’ ve always taken a resigned , even fatalistic, view toward accumulating music. There’s so much must out there, you can’t expect to hear it all or have an encyclopedic knowledge of any genre, much less the entire canon…