Can’t we wait until we’ve resolved the body count? Until the identities of all of the victims have been determined and their families informed? Until the sirens stop wailing? Until the blood is dry? Or must we instantly bootstrap obliquely related agendas and utterly unconnected grievances to the…

A woman attends a funeral in Beirut for a relative killed in last week's terror attacks. JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty If social media is an expression of public sentiment, then it seems significant that perhaps the most widely shared tweet on Friday's terror attacks in Paris was not about Paris at all but…

MILWAUKEE — More than 10 months of campaign activity have left the Republican Party in a quandary. The contest for the GOP’s presidential nomination has no obvious front-runner. This has been a confusing race almost from the beginning, and it seems only to grow more muddled. That became apparent…

MILAN — The Paris slaughter claimed by the Islamic State constitutes, as President François Hollande of France declared, an “act of war.” As such, it demands of all NATO states a collective response under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. This says that, “An armed attack against one or more of…

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them. Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man…

FORT DODGE, Iowa — As Donald Trump took the stage in a community college theater on Thursday night, something was off. The usually punctual executive was nearly 40 minutes late. His voice was hoarse, his hair mussed, his tone defensive. He promised to take questions from the audience but instead…

John Mulaney has had a bit of a rough year. His long-awaited, much-anticipated sitcom, Mulaney , made its Fox debut a little over 13 months ago, and it wasn’t much of a hit. If anything, it was the opposite, ultimately getting shuffled around the network’s available time slots and harshly panned by…

As France enters yet another period of mourning, Lebanon is just emerging from one. Not that you probably heard anything about it. Chris Graham reports. If you didn’t know better, you could be excused for believing that the planning behind the latest terrorist attack in Paris is about more than just…

When a friend told me past midnight to check the news about Paris, I had no idea that I would be looking at a map of a city I love, delineating locations undergoing terrorist attacks simultaneously. I zoomed in on that map closer; one of the locations was right to where I had stayed when I was there…

My dad died in an Airbnb rental, and he’s not the only one. What can the company do to improve safety? Photo-illustrations by Matter T he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the…

“Who are you? What do you do?” Those questions, put to Steve Jobs by his erstwhile partner Steve Wozniak in the middle of a heated argument, are both practical and rhetorical. Jobs is not a designer, an engineer or a coder — he relies on other people to do all of that, among them his “little buddy”…

The militants who are killing civilians, raping and forcing captured women into sexual slavery , and beheading foreigners in Iraq and Syria are known by several names: the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS; the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL; and, more recently, the Islamic…

“The stage was set. And we turned up. And the people said, 'yes.' And then it just exploded.” Twenty years after Britpop, Noel Gallagher is still our most outspoken rock star. Exclusively for Esquire , he talks about the highs and lows of Oasis, marriage, midlife crises, fame, fatherhood, going solo…

"When are we going to see women in the UFC, dude?" – TMZ cameraman "Never." – Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, 2011 *** On a recent fall afternoon at New York's London Hotel, Ultimate Fighting Championship's first and current Women's Bantamweight champion, Ronda Rousey, sat…

Getty Images Self-driving cars will someday be the norm on American roads. But until that happens, there are going to be a lot of awkward run-ins with people who don't quite understand the concept of a car that drives itself. Case in point: this photo , captured by Zandr Milewski and posted to…

Nathan For YouSeason 3 Nathan For YouSeason 3 "Smokers Allowed" A- Nathan For YouSeason 3 "Smokers Allowed" A- A- "Smokers Allowed" Episode 5 By rights, Nathan Fielder’s name should be mentioned alongside Marina Abramovic, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Rauschenberg in any list of significant…

This week we have witnessed a phenomenal act of social movement-making in an era when many, myself included, have wondered if meaningful change in the U.S. still possible. Some of that worry is about aging, I’m sure. As you get older and the people around you get older you are inclined to wonder if…

Editor’s note: All North Koreans in the following story have been given pseudonyms. “What about this Donald Trump guy?” It was a fair question, but the last I expected from a North Korean. Mr. Gang, I’ll call him, is a wealthy, middle-aged businessman from Pyongyang. We met outside the North a few…

W hen the Transportation Security Administration dispatched undercover investigators last spring to test the effectiveness of airport checkpoints, the results were deplorable . Agents posing as passengers were able to smuggle weapons and mock explosives through 67 out of 70 TSA checkpoints — a…

Monica Bellucci and Daniel Craig in the new Bond film, directed by Sam Mendes. Illustration by Señor Salme When did you last hand over your white dinner jacket to be pressed? To be precise, when did you last hand it over on a train , to an obliging steward? That is not, as far as I am aware, a…

Inside Trudeau’s epic victory By Paul Wells INTRODUCTION Sunny, sunny ways How Justin Trudeau’s campaign of hard work and hope landed him a whopping majority L et us begin, against the mood sweeping much of the land, with a downer. The speech Justin Trudeau delivered on Monday night was long, 24…

The movies have always been in love with themselves. For all their heroes and villains, lost loves and epic stories, Hollywood’s greatest source of mythology has always been its own history. Almost from the birth of the medium, movies have explored the filmmaking process and satirized their own…

Roger Deakins is the director of photography on films such as The Shawshank Redemption, A Beautiful Mind, No Country for Old Men, True Grit and Skyfall, the most successful British film ever. He's won more than 60 awards for his work, including three Baftas, and was last year presented with a…

In December 1988, Jörg Winger was a West German Army radio operator eavesdropping on Soviet military channels when he overheard a startling message: The Russians wished him Merry Christmas by name. “That was the moment where we realized that we had moles on the base,” he recalled. Mr. Winger, now a…

Lara Croft faced one of her most deadly situations yet in 2008. Tomb Raider: Underworld , the eighth game of the series, had failed to meet sales expectations with just 1.5 million copies. After 12 years, it was uncertain if gamers were still interested in adventures from Lara. From the beginning,…

The first and final chapters of the legendary director’s complicated career One day in 1974 , Orson Welles, John Huston, and the comedian Rich Little were sitting in a Denny’s near Carefree, Arizona, about to order a meal. Huston and Little were acting in Welles’s new film, The Other Side of the…

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,…