Abe Zeines’s hilltop mansion in Puerto Rico looks like a frat house after a rager. A wrecked golf cart blocks the driveway. An SUV with a blown tire sits on the grass out front. A porch overlooking the Caribbean is littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts. It’s a Monday morning in June, and…

As mass shootings have become ever more familiar, experts have come to understand them less as isolated expressions of rage and more as acts that build on the blueprints of previous rampages. Experts in violence prevention say that many, if not most, perpetrators of such shootings have intensively…

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print. As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy…

In Memoriam 1942 – 2013 “Roger Ebert loved movies.” RogerEbert.com Reviews Great Movies Chaz's Journal Blogs Far Flungers Channels Contributors Slender Man Nothing is scarier than bad filmmaking. Skate Kitchen A solid hangout movie as well as a band-of-buddies film. Other Reviews BlacKkKlansman A…

One of our favorite pastimes is speculating about what jobs will left over after a allegedly imminent deluge of technological unemployment. This speculation is, of course, pointless. It defines future employability in terms of “can’t be automated.” But, for a variety of reasons, that is a fairly…

It was summertime in Manhattan, dark and balmy, almost midnight, on the Upper West Side. He and I rounded the corner from Amsterdam. Drinks had gone well. Walking me home, he held my hand. Tipsy, I said, “You can’t come up,” and stopped near a stoop. “I don’t want to,” he said coyly, placing his…

WASHINGTON — Inside the Beltway, Libya is the name of a scandal, not a country. But right now, Libya the country has a chance to right its course in its difficult transition to democracy. United Nations talks among the warring factions have come close to yielding a new unified government. For this…

Last week, the magazine published a cover story I wrote about the history of the narrative of the killing of Osama bin Laden. For two days after the article was posted online, the reaction was overwhelming and positive; most readers seemed to grasp the intent of the piece — which was to explore the…

[ETA: This is a three part post! Part 2, offensive gender and sexuality stereotypes, is here . Part 3, offensive race stereotypes, is here .] So let’s say that you’re a writer looking to do some game writing. Maybe you’ve got a game you’re looking to design, or a setting or piece of game fiction to…

We got our very first taste today of the upcoming Bond film, Spectre , with a brief presser announcing the movie's name and production and cast info. Daniel Craig will return as Bond, as will Naomie Harris as Miss Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes as M and Ben Whishaw as Q. Monica Bellucci and Léa Seydoux…

A friend calls unexpected connections with lost loved ones “winks,” and finding Google Maps photos of my mother felt like a wink of monumental proportions. Source: Google Maps Every now and again, when I’ve been working for too many hours without a break or have spent an entire day writing…

A philosopher is perhaps the last person you’d expect to have a hand in designing your next car, but that’s exactly what one expert on self-driving vehicles has in mind. Chris Gerdes , a professor at Stanford University, leads a research lab that is experimenting with sophisticated hardware and…

Late last summer, I traveled to San Francisco to give a talk at a conference on corporate communications. There, one speaker identified herself as a “corporate storyteller.” Her job, she explained, is to help companies develop a “humanizing narrative.” Next up was a “story strategist,” who advises…

It’s no secret that Metal Gear Solid is a montage of the strange and bizarre. From nanobot-powered vampires to cyborgs with white blood, there’s no shortage of head-scratching moments amidst all the sneaking around and monologuing. But, now in its 17th year, Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus seems to be…

Intimidating! Photo: Hero Images/Corbis As the tides of history and gender change, it would be easy to assume that men — recently unseated as the dominant intellects and degree-havers in the U.S . — would adapt to a world where women are not only their equals, but often their intellectual superiors.…

At this point in history, no author is more divisive than Jonathan Franzen. Even people who like his books have to admit that they’re kind of terrible. In Grantland, Brian Phillips wrote: “Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen, and this is frustrating because his novels…

R emember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and…

By Suzy Menkes Friday 23 October 2015 Getty The announcement that Raf Simons is resigning from his position as creative director of Christian Dior might seem like a sequel to Dior and I . That film showed the Belgian designer's arrival at the historic Parisian house, his struggle, his tears, his…

I recently attended TwitchCon in San Francisco and was drawn into a conversation with a fellow booth worker about women on Twitch. We ended up chatting about that myth that we all hear brought up every once in a while: that women streamers have it easier on Twitch. Twitch.tv is a video game…

The wild success of developer Naughty Dog's Uncharted series heavily relies on its protagonist, Nathan Drake, a funnier, friendlier, less crotchety Indiana Jones. The treasure hunter searches for worldly riches through clues of past, historic treasure hunters. Of course, Drake is never the only one…

Bronson Arroyo was in some small town near Los Angeles, the name of which he doesn’t remember, and he was thinking about getting old. He and a friend had stopped at a diner to get a bite to eat, and he couldn’t help but notice all of the old men seated around them. He recalls this moment a few weeks…

This article originally appeared on VICE US It started as so many great ideas do: on a Saturday morning, lying in bed watching SportsCenter, and talking to strangers on Twitter. I don't think any of this would've happened if Twitter hadn't been invented. So I'm on Twitter and some white person asked…

(Warning: This article contains spoilers about important story beats within Spec Ops: The Line.) A devastating, clipping drought has gripped the midwest the last few months. While driving through Illinois farm country this weekend, a store selling farm equipment propped a telling sign out front: “Do…

Throughout the history of war-themed shooting video games, game designers have often thought about how they might use the tools at their disposal to explore a new dimension of commentary on their subject matter even as they also succeeded in creating best-selling entertainment. Yager’s Spec Ops: The…

Few games give you the option to skip over a mission before you play it, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ’s controversial “No Russian” mission is one of them. Even today, the stage that made players a terrorist remains shocking. Yes, that actually happened. Here’s the image greeting players…

When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the…

What the future of low-wage work really looks like. By Dave Jamieson Art by Davide Bonazzi Dave Jamieson On Jan. 18, 2013, as the sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr. got ready for work. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. His wife, Di-Key, was…

Justin Payne spends his days pouring concrete in the suburbs of Toronto. Almost every other waking hour, he's on his smartphone pretending to be a little boy or girl. Payne, 28, considers himself a vigilante pedophile hunter. At any given time, the construction worker is logged onto three different…

Some of the more successful shows on TV right now find an audience by burning through plots — some, like Empire , eventually enter hypersoap space and practically turn plaid . Most of these take the form of more , layering on subplots, like or throwing in increasing numbers of characters, like Game…

On Monday night, WWE had a Legends homecoming on Raw , trotting out “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, and Ric Flair to spice up the proceedings and build hype for Sunday’s Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. The lineup was also something of a test run for next year’s WrestleMania , which will…

Spike Lee Sounds Off on Chi-Raq , Gun Violence, and Rahm In his first in-depth interview for his upcoming film, the outspoken director discusses Chicago and how the mayor tried—and failed—to “bully” him. Published Oct. 22, 2015, at 11:29 a.m. Spike Lee at Navy Pier on October 16 Photo: Saverio…

Here is an embarrassing story about a bad purchase. When I was 15 or 16, I spent a few summer weeks doing odd jobs in an extended family member’s auto body shop. It wasn’t especially hard or grueling work: paired with another surly teen, I disposed of a mound of twisted and crumpled body-shop scrap,…

Omar Bustamante/Fusion The systematic destruction of Paul and Amy Strater’s lives began with pizza. Several years ago, pizzas began showing up at the front door of their home in Oswego, Illinois, a middle-class suburb about 50 miles west of Chicago. It might have been a nice surprise, except the…

Tom Hanks is a lawyer who defends a Soviet agent in Steven Spielberg’s film, written by Matt Charman and the Coen Bros. Illustration by Olivier Balez The new Steven Spielberg film, “Bridge of Spies,” begins with a man in a mirror. The man is Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), and we see three…

[Content warning: This post contains, among many other things discussion of anti-Native ethnic slurs.] So there’s thing that happens semi-regularly to me in my G+ circles; someone links to a game that is being crowdfunded (usually on KickStarter) that is cringe-inducingly racist, and there’s a…

Mythbusters is a long-running show, with 14 seasons and 267 episodes under its belt. It was recently announced that the show was coming to an end , and stars Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman seem equal parts saddened and relieved by the news. 12 years is a very long time to work on a single show, and…

OTTAWA — After his sweeping victory in Canada’s election on Monday, Justin Trudeau received the customary telephone calls from other world leaders. Yet along with their congratulations was the suggestion that he should enjoy the postelection glow because, he said he was told, it’s “all downhill”…

One question. Ten minutes. No excuses. Flickr / theloushe After reading yet another account of how so many entrepreneurs and business people find excuses to avoid research, I want to expose these objections as the fear-spawned, ego-propelled straw herrings they are. No time? No money? No stomach for…