TIRANA, Albania — After investing thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours meticulously planning for his moment, Ismail Morina realized he had made a rookie mistake. It was 9:25 p.m. last Oct. 14, and Morina, a 33-year-old Albanian crane operator, was standing in one of the towers of the Church of…

In a rare interview, the '80s comedy blockbuster star (really!) explains to THR that he's not retired, what he's been doing for two decades (voice work, raising children) and what it would take to get him back in front of a camera: "I'll continue to be picky. Picky has worked for me." This story…

It’s a Monday night, and there’s a line down Hollywood Boulevard, a hundred or so millennials, most of whom are white, many of whom are wearing sports jerseys, all eagerly waiting to see Lil Dicky headline at the Fonda Theatre. Which for many passersby, and now many readers, probably raised the…

Source: Official promo Meow The Jewels is probably the most a musical artist has pandered to the internet’s obsession with cats and the endless entertainment they bring since… ever. Starting merely as a joke, El-P and Killer Mike said they would recreate the entirety of their absolutely fantastic…

The main thing you should know about autonomous vehicles is that they are utterly inevitable. Mat Honan / BuzzFeed News The thing about covering tech, especially for a long time, is that you have these moments where you get to really reach out and touch the future. They're rare. But you get to the…

Elena Scotti/FUSION Imagine for a moment that, one day in the future, a major pharmaceutical company released a new miracle drug that radically and instantaneously enhanced human performance. Everyone who took it immediately became significantly faster, stronger, and more efficient. As a result,…

Will Hart/USA Network Vincent D’Onofrio and Patti Smith on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” Maybe the most surprising detail about Sunday’s episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” – based, don’tcha know, on the real-life circus that is Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” – was the number of…

Photo: Bloomua via Shutterstock Presented in San Jose’s U.S. District Court, the key issue in Perkins v. LinkedIn is spam. Namely, during the user sign-up process, LinkedIn claims that it “will not store your password or email anyone without your permission.” Despite this, LinkedIn sends automated…

For our October 'Nowstalgia' issue , on stands 10/20 , we asked three rap icons to pay tribute to lost leaders of the game. Stay tuned this week for pieces by Eminem on Tupac and Swizz Beatz on the Notorious B.I.G. Eazy-E. Photo by Chi Modu I remember when I was five or six years old, waking up one…

This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames , in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise. In this edition, he looks at Vagabond Dog’s cut throat RPG Always Sometimes Monsters. “Set out on a cross-country journey to win back the love of your life and…

Editor’s Note: This article is one of the top 10 habits to adopt to be better at your job in 2016. See the full list here. Eureka moments are rare. The backstory behind great ideas is often more complex and winding than having an apple fall on your head. But the best part is that creative ideas…

“Most of the time, no one sees these performances,” Miranda July says matter-of-factly when describing her theater appearances, the most recent of which, “New Society,” comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Oct. 7 through 10. July, of course, is exaggerating just a bit. Her four-night run at BAM…

On the night of Dec. 5, 1989, Vladimir V. Putin, then a lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., watched with alarm as thousands of East Germans in Dresden swarmed the riverside compound of the dreaded secret police, the Stasi. The Berlin Wall had been breached the month before, and the Communist…

The recent Volkswagen scandal has not only angered many of its customers, it is also threatening the prospects of hundreds of dealerships around the country that are anxious to learn how to fix diesel cars that intentionally thwart emissions tests. And it is happening at a delicate time for…

We all have that friend: the beautiful, intelligent, driven woman who—like Katherine Heigl in every rom-com—can't find a decent date. Every guy she goes out with is an asshole; she consistently dates "below" her league, and she's on the verge of giving up on a committed relationship altogether. Not…

Is snobbery dead? Before exploring the possible answers — Mais non! Good riddance! Who cares? — we should perhaps define our terms. The word “snob” has a contested etymology and an interestingly tangled set of uses. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (no second-rate sources here; what do you…

Every couple of years between now and the end of time, we can probably count on a new James Bond movie opening. It could be really good. It could be great. It could be fantastic. It could be The Third Man mixed with Lawrence of Arabia with a dash of Raiders of the Lost Ark thrown in. And it will…

Back in March, during an off-week on his first season of “Saturday Night Live,” Pete Davidson flew to Los Angeles to perform at the Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber. In a slim black suit and $1,200 Don C Air Jordan 2s, he took the stage first, casually decimating the host, Kevin Hart, and the…

Among the myriad complaints about the second season of HBO’s “True Detective,” perhaps the most common — and surely the most vehemently expressed on social media — was that the plot was impossible to follow. Considering the genre, this objection seems a little beside the point: What passes for plot…

May 8, 1945 V-E Day. Germany surrenders and World War II ends in Europe. Final Surrender in Berlin Ruins Aug. 2, 1945 The Potsdam Conference concludes and Germany and its capital Berlin are divided and occupied by the allied victors. Germany Stripped of Industry by Big 3; 5 Powers to Plan Peace June…

For observers of religious royalty, last week in New York was a bonanza. In town, for various reasons, were His Holiness, Pope Francis; Her Holiness, Beyoncé, to perform in Central Park; and a group of people who like to “feel that they’re the sun around which everyone orbits,” as a representative…

Patti Smith, the musician and author, in the yard of her home in Rockaway Beach, Queens. She calls it her Alamo. Credit Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By One bright afternoon last month, the Rockaways’ meticulously restored boardwalk gleamed in the sun, as did Patti Smith’s sparsely…

Overshadowed by its relative smallness and obscured by its relative complexity, the six-month-old civil war in Yemen is the middle child of Middle East conflict. Recently, its most prominent mentions in the U.S. have been in the Republican debates as candidates have placed the rebellion by…

Something vaguely shocking: Trevor Noah taking over “The Daily Show” almost feels like a non-event. Maybe it’s because we’re slightly hungover, hot-take-wise, from Stephen Colbert taking over “The Late Show.” Maybe it’s because, beyond his initial opening monologue, it’s relatively business as usual…

On the ad blocking front, the situation keeps getting worse. Until now, the media industry pretended to ignore the problem, perhaps waiting for a miracle cure. This might turn into a long lull. In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on the state of the ad blocking…

Beginning today (Sept. 1), Sony/ATV Music Publishing-owned EMI Production Music has launched a six month amnesty on undeclared samples from its music library, allowing artists and producers that have knowingly or unknowingly used a piece of music -- be it a drum break, saxophone hook, keyboard…

This is Keith and his roommate, Mark, who designed an aircraft while wasted – and didn’t want to be identified.Photograph: Hannah Jane Parkinson T he news is, to put it mildly, pretty depressing recently – social media equally so. Twitter timelines are filled with the horrors of war and unspeakable…

Who's behind all those cover tracks filling up your Spotify search results? Everyone knows Taylor Swift’s music is not on Spotify — she made sure of that when she very publicly left the service last year. But if you search her name there, you’ll see multiple songs that are, ostensibly, “Taylor Swift…

In the weeks leading up to last night’s debut of CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert , there were two prevailing pieces of press spin. Forget that old Head & Shoulders ad slogan , “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Colbert’s decade-long reign on his self-titled show…

Sometimes it takes going Full Mickey to recognize that Dismaland is real, and resistance is futile. “Dismaland is, quite literally, art about nothing. Consumerism is bad, Disney is evil, advertising is dishonest — we got it.” — Mike Nudelman, Business Insider No matter how your heart is grieving…

Photo: Mike Sullivan/Roseburg News-Review via AP As a shaken President Obama put it in his address Thursday night , the reaction to yesterday’s mass murder at Umpqua Community College has taken a sickeningly familiar course: “Somehow this has become routine,” he said. “The reporting is routine. My…

After getting his start in his native Holland with wild, sexually explicit dramas like Spetters and Turkish Delight (a 1974 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film), director Paul Verhoeven came to Hollywood in the Eighties and rebranded himself as a can-do-anything sci-fi filmmaker with a…

The 294th mass shooting in America this year happened Thursday in Oregon at Umpqua Community College. A 26-year-old man with six guns killed nine people and wounded several more. I'm not including his name because he doesn't deserve to be named or remembered—he deserves only to be forgotten. Local…

In August, researchers announced they had genetically engineered yeast to produce the powerful painkiller hydrocodone. Now comes the perhaps inevitable sequel: Scientists have created yeasts that can make important constituents of marijuana, including the main psychoactive compound,…

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. For the past three-and-a-half years or so, I’ve been working with a small team of students on an…

Before I explain why I’m grateful for the return of Project Greenlight , let me admit up front that I understand why it went away for 10 years. Through three seasons that ran between 2001 and 2005, HBO’s reality series, which was conceived at a moment of peak optimism about independent film and was…

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, confronted by objectors. James Martin/CNET Uber can't avoid controversy, no matter how hard (or not) it tries. On Thursday evening, during a taping of "The Late Show With Stephen…

The great philosopher Homer Simpson once memorably described alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Internet advertising is a bit like that — the funder of and terrible nuisance baked into everything you do online. Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy…