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…

0 Like In the old British working man’s club setting of Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, three young Torontonian jazz musicians are tinkering around soundchecking for tonight’s show. Far from what would spring to mind when picturing a ‘Jazz Trio’ – the group sport Nike SBs, 5-Panels, Stussy T-shirts…

Not all PC games run at 60 frames per second, and for some people, that’s a big problem. The Framerate Police group is, with nearly 100,000 followers, the tenth most popular curator on all of Steam. Their aim? To list the top possible framerate of any game that’s locked at 30 FPS or less. As they…

The Slatest has moved! You can find new stories here . Slate The Slatest Your News Companion Judge Invalidates Happy Birthday Song Copyright, Freeing Applebee’s Servers to Serenade You Happy Birthday To You song enters the public domain. Photo by YVES HERMAN/AFP/GettyImages A federal judge on…

CBS Last night, Donald Trump appeared as a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert . You could also say that Colbert had Trump as a guest, but that grammar wouldn’t be quite accurate to the spirit of the interview. Because, last night, Colbert was trumped. Ted Cruz Finds Few Late-Night Laughs…

Courtesy of Philippe Bossé/Roadside Attractions Since its first trailer debuted, and maybe even before that, Stonewall , Roland Emmerich’s dramatization of the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn, a seismic event credited with kicking off the modern gay-rights movement, has been met with dread. Partly…

Matt Hall is, by almost every definition of the word, ‘successful’. 50 million downloads and $10 million later, Crossy Road is probably his most high profile success, but it’s one of many. Of the seven games Matt has released on iOS, a mind-boggling five have made it to the number one spot. How does…

Shutterstock Three years ago, a man asked Doug Williams for help. He was a Department of Homeland Security agent, he said, under investigation by his employer for letting a friend pass through customs with contraband. Would Williams help him pass a lie detector test? Williams, a former Oklahoma City…

“I wanted to go further than anyone had taken a film crew before. I wanted a movie that everybody watched and went, ‘The people that made this are absolutely insane.’ A film that looked and felt dangerous, the way I watched Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Like, ‘How in the hell did Werner…

Tom Pennington/Getty Images Most weeks in American politics bring few surprises. But recent weeks have brought four. First, Scott Walker, who looked to be the conservative establishment's pick for the GOP nomination, dropped out of the race. Then John Boehner unexpectedly resigned from Congress…

There’s a simple way to end poverty: the government just gives everyone enough money, so nobody is poor. No ifs, buts, conditions, or tests. Everyone gets the minimum they need to survive, even if they already have plenty. World Changing Ideas : This is part of Co.Exist’s annual collection of some…

LONDON — A loyal Volkswagen owner for years, Jane Kelley was “shocked,” she says, by recent revelations that the German company had cheated on emissions tests in the United States. Snug in Ms. Kelley’s garage in North London recently was a white 2013 Passat powered by a 2-liter diesel engine. The…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NOMI MALONE! COMMEMORATING 20 SIN-EMATIC YEARS WITH THE GLORIOUS EXCESS OF SHOWGIRLS About five years ago I mademy way over to Montana Street in Santa Monica to attend a screening of PaulVerhoeven’s magnificently loopy adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers at the Aero…

On paper, Review checks off nearly every box that makes a TV comedy take off in 2015 — or, at least, that makes one a full-fledged cult hit on the Internet. The show, which concludes its second season tomorrow night, is, like BoJack Horseman , Rick and Morty , Louie , and so on, what you might call…

Getty Images Google started work on Project Fi, its experimental cell phone service, about two and a half years ago. And according to Laura Holmes, who has worked on the project for most of that time, there were many inside the company who believed it would never work. “Everyone internally and…