On Tuesday 22 September, Middle East Eye broke the story of a senior member of the Saudi royal family calling for a “change” in leadership to fend off the kingdom’s collapse. In a letter circulated among Saudi princes, its author, a grandson of the late King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, blamed incumbent King…

Paint this scene in your mind. A quiet street in Mountain View, California. Bungalows, hybrid cars, sunshine. Now, add a wild turkey sprinting onto the road. Then a woman chasing it. In a wheelchair. Wielding a broom. And finally: because this town is the home of Google, a self-driving car pulls…

Ed Houben is Europe’s most virile man. And after years of donating sperm the “normal” way (sterile room, cup, cash), he and some women looking to get pregnant for free began cutting out the middlemen and getting it done as nature prefers it (sex!). Today, Houben has over a hundred children—and Ed…

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child. Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January,…

JACKASS: THE MOVIE, 2002(c) Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection. Everett ‘Old Men Behaving Badly’ The Jackass crew's penchant for dressing up in geriatric prosthetics and wreaking havoc gave birth to a number of memorable pranks ("old-man balls," anyone?), as well as a spin-off movie/franchise:…

Michael Fassbender in Slow West , Brie Larson in Room , Selena Gomez and James Franco in Spring Breakers , Jason Segel in The End of the Tour , Emma Watson in The Bling Ring , Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina . Animated photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Logo by GrandArmy Photos via A24. When…

Share With a hit under their belts, the makers of Gone Home are setting up a different kind of studio. On the face of it, Karla Zimonja and Steve Gaynor are living the indie developer dream. Since the 2013 release of Gone Home — a commercial hit and a critical darling — the owners of Fullbright have…

Donald J. Trump Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times By ‘I don’t worry about anything,’’ Donald J. Trump told me aboard his 757 as we were flying to the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He was dividing his attention between the brick-size…

WALBRZYCH, Poland — The gold diggers have arrived here in Lower Silesia. They have stormed the Ksiaz Castle. Upended earth and artifacts. Emptied store shelves of metal detectors. In normal times, Lower Silesia, a province in southwest Poland, has an unassuming charm and struggles financially. But…

Becoming Rihanna In a world of phonies, Rihanna is the realest. How she manages this, we may never know. Story byMary H.K. Choi Photography byRenata Raksha Self-portraits by Rihanna x Renata Raksha Styling by Shibon Kennedy Rihanna x Renata Raksha ADVERTISEMENT As I’m writing this, there are members…

MIXTAPE: Burn It All Down September 19, 2014 - Mixtapes rat chaos (2012) j chastain So here’s how I assemble these mixtapes. I play short games all the time. If I notice several games with a similar theme, I throw the titles into an Evernote page and record the number of games. As I play more games…

Capitol Records had a problem. The year was 2000, and one of the biggest bands on its roster was about to release the highly anticipated follow-up to its breakthrough album without a radio single or music video. The band members also declined most interview requests, and as far as the executives at…

MIXTAPE: No Interaction May 5, 2013 - Mixtapes Okay, let’s talk about non-interactive games. When people in a poorly written critical essay or internet comment get anxious about a Dear Esther or a dys4ia this is an accusation they often bring out, after all. It’s fine, you know, but it’s not really…

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, James Parker and Liesl Schillinger discuss the pleasures of reading forbidden books. By James Parker After Henry Miller, it might be all right to lie on the floor of the universe in a dirty coat and wait for…

Issue 2 of 'Optic Nerve.' All images courtesy of Adrian Tomine In 1991, a teenage Adrian Tomine began self-publishing Optic Nerve , a semi-autobiographical comic series starring an affable cast of oddballs and misfits. The stories were short, steeped in realism, and drawn with elegance and…

Action Bronson and Mario Batali Illustration by Tom Bachtell If chefs are “the new rock stars” (the Times ) and rap is “the new rock and roll” (Kanye West), then the Roger Daltrey of the current moment is a cannonball-shaped thirty-one-year-old rapper from Flushing named Action Bronson. A…

No guts, no glory, the old saying goes. You gotta takes risks. Sit on a lead in the third period, watch the lead disappear. Same thing in politics, as Thomas Mulcair and the NDP are learning now. They've been serving up Pablum. Almost 70 per cent of voters say they want change. But on economic…

Sometimes the Internet completely lets you down. And then you have to do things to make the Internet aware of your disappointment with the hope that it never happens again. Last week, His Holiness Francis, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme…

Pro-independence parties in Spain's Catalonia region have won an absolute majority in regional elections. The main separatist alliance and a smaller nationalist party won 72 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament. However, the pro-independence parties fell just short of getting 50% of the vote,…

@spanswminessota via Twitter The Spanish state of Catalonia, which counts Barcelona as its capital city, could secede from the rest of the country if the group that just won the state's elections has its way. On Sunday, a coalition of political parties which have promised to lead Catalonia to become…

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker, based on a George Wallace campaign poster . Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images. In Dallas , Donald Trump was a rock star. When he slammed “illegals,” his audience of 16,000 whooped. When he promised to build a wall on the Mexican border, they hollered. And…

Share In Phil Owen 's new book, he sets out to examine games from a critical standpoint. In his own words: "After decades fighting the perception that video games are little more than diverting toys, the games industry won its most important battle: in 2011, the United States Supreme Court…

Line on Sierra: King’s Quest IV, Part II April 6, 2015 - Features / Line On Sierra Last time in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella , I made it through the long, inventory-stuffing introduction sequence and out of the dreaded whale’s mouth. Now I’m ready to defeat evil and bring hope to the…

Line on Sierra: King’s Quest IV, Part I March 23, 2015 - Features / Line On Sierra After another Space Quest and a highly unfortunate Police Quest , it’s finally time to return to the flagship series with King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella . It represents the biggest leap in graphical quality in…

Line on Sierra: King’s Quest III, Part 2 October 5, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans As always, if you want to play along, the first three King’s Quest games are available in a package on GOG.com. When we last left Gwydion the Magical Orphan , he had turned his evil wizard captor / object of…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest III, Part 1 July 3, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans After a diversion into Space Quest , my chronological journey through Sierra’s Quest games returns to the flagship series. King’s Quest III is unusual among the games in this project because I’d actually played a…

MIXTAPE: You Lose for Playing June 17, 2014 - Mixtapes Execution , Jesse Venbrux (2008) Over the years, I’ve played or read about a lot of games that push the player to feel bad or conflicted about doing the things the game allows. The idea fascinated me when I first played Bioshock ; by the time I…

I appeared as a love addict on a live morning television talk show in Detroit in the late 1980s, when I was 28. The producer, whom I knew through my job as a New York City book publicist, arranged for me to fly out to be a guest, along with an author who had written a book on love addiction. In…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 2 January 24, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans In Part 1 of my adventures in King’s Quest I , I dicked around, made a map, then gave up and started reading a walkthrough. In Part 2 I finished the game with liberal application of said walkthrough, and started…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest II February 12, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans Welcome back to Line On Sierra! Last time, I stumbled around King’s Quest I [ part 1 , part 2 ]. If you want to follow along, both games are available in the King’s Quest 1+2+3 pack from Good Old Games . OH HEY THERE.…

If I were going to date a typeface, it would probably be something like Franklin Gothic bold condensed. The font is undeniably masculine—sans-serif, solid, reliable. If it were a human, it’d be the type of guy who would fix my broken sink and play football in the backyard on Thanksgiving. I’m not…

Donald Trump this week repeated his pledge to build a 2,000-mile-long border wall, telling Stephen Colbert that it would be a "big and beautiful" project and that he's going to get Mexico to pay for it. (check's in the mail, gringo). Trump says the wall is the best way to keep out criminals,…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 1 January 19, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans Between 1983 and 1998, Sierra On-Line released an absurd number of adventure games. Recently, GOG.com had a package deal on a major subset of them: the four classic series that shared the “Quest” brand. These…

Line on Sierra: Space Quest II August 5, 2014 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans After a soul-sucking experience as a fussy cop who can’t drive , Line on Sierra returns to actual adventures in Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge ! Since this is a Space Quest game, “adventure” means dying over and over in…

MIXTAPE: Fourth Wall Breakers September 22, 2015 - Mixtapes I’ve always been attracted to media that break the fourth wall. In movies and TV, this can be used to resist the traditional philosophy that the equipment that makes a film is ugly and uncouth and should be treated as a silent observer of a…

Line On Sierra: Space Quest I March 2, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans King’s Quest may have been the flagship franchise of the Sierra adventure games, but as a kid it wasn’t my favorite series. That honor went to Probably because gruesome death jokes and Star Wars references were my primary…

Line on Sierra: Police Quest I February 8, 2014 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans I’m not going to beat around the bush here. I’ve played a lot of games over the past few years. A lot of them were hard to get through for various reasons. But I am confident in saying that Police Quest: In Pursuit of the…

Elena Scotti/Fusion This week, I interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Awards , an event that recognizes those protecting freedom on the Internet. We chatted by Google Hangout because Snowden remains in Russia, stuck in international limbo…

On Thursday, Joe West—the umpire you know by name because he is an umpire who wants you to know him by name—got into a ridiculous staring contest with Madison Bumgarner. The Giants tall tale character was upset with West's strike zone and West doesn't need an excuse to put himself in the spotlight,…