The Apple CEO addresses new iPhone features, privacy concerns, the iPad Pro as a desktop replacement, and why you can't delete that pesky Stocks app, in a car ride across Manhattan. Jon Premosch For Buzzfeed News Tim Cook is twisted sideways in the deep passenger-side backseat of a black Cadillac…

Welcome back to AVQ&A ( Gameological edition), where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to…

Leonard E. Read (1898-1983) founded FEE in 1946 and served as its president until his death. “ I, Pencil ,” his most famous essay, was first published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman . I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and…

by Brian Feldman In the first chapter of his book, After Photography , digital photography theorist Fred Ritchin explains the central selling point of digital over analog: Digital is based on an architecture of infinitely repeatable abstractions in which the original and its copy are the same;…

Breaking out of the hard drive prison The inexorable transition away from physical media is also leading to situations where games end up trapped on a specific piece of hardware, where they can be hard to archive in the long term. A prominent example of this popped up quite recently, when Konami…

“Hunting for distribution rights is essentially detective work,” says Marcin Paczyński, Head of Product at GOG . “Rights can repeatedly change hands or be split up between different parties, and it’s our job to get to the bottom of what happened.” Preservation of old games involves more than just an…

Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords seemed like a very easy game to make. It came hot on the heels of its Bioware-developed prequel, which is still one of the most colorful, optimistic tributes to the Star Wars universe. You had a fake Chewbacca, a fake Darth Vader, a fake Death Star, and…

At an IFP Film Week panel, distribution executives weighed in on advice, challenges and tips for navigating the distribution marketplace. Panelists included Dylan Marchetti, Chief Creative Officer at Amplify Releasing; Camille Bertrand, Manager of Acquisitions at Bleecker Street; Asher Goldstein, VP…

This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Rinse and Repeat. It discusses in detail how some of the game systems work and what happens in the end, and IT SPOILS THE GAME . You are heavily encouraged to play the game and draw your own conclusions before reading what I think. (Again,…

In June of 2006 I became the first musician to build a worldwide following on YouTube. I posted videos every couple of days and called it my “Virtual Summer Tour.” I played my own original songs and some covers. I talked into the camera and answered questions submitted by my nascent online audience.…

The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex. Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 107TH 33 1/3 ON BEAT HAPPENING , WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF BEAT HAPPENING WEEK BY AUTHOR BRYAN PARKER ! Beat Happening’s eponymous first album laid the groundwork for the material central force Calvin Johnson’s K Records imprint…

A esthetically speaking, Twins.com is one of the world’s least-interesting websites. It doesn’t take long to load, but that’s only because there’s nothing to see. In an instant, one can survey all the homepage has to offer: a pixelated “D&D” logo, and an accompanying name, D&D Miller. Then there’s…

Daily cartoon Daily cartoon 1/45 15 October 2016 2/45 14 October 2016 3/45 13 October 2016 4/45 12 October 2016 5/45 11 October 2016 6/45 10 October 2016 7/45 9 October 2016 8/45 8 October 2016 9/45 7 October 2016 10/45 6 October 2016 11/45 5 October 2016 Dave Brown 12/45 4 October 2016 13/45 3…

WASHINGTON — The White House on Friday announced wide-ranging changes to loosen travel, commerce and investment restrictions on Cuba , moving to fulfill President Obama ’s goal of breaking down barriers between Washington and Havana even as the American embargo remains in place. The rules will allow…

President Obama and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, last November. They are hoping to announce an agreement this week. Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — The United States and China are negotiating what could become the first arms control accord for cyberspace, embracing a…

I have something in common with Ahmed Mohamed: as a youngster, I was also an electronics enthusiast. At his age and even earlier, I frequently took apart electronic devices – anything from my own toys, to broken things around the house, and even that dirty garbage-picked black and white TV my…

First Coast News A man in Florida says he was banned from Disney World because he joked about building a meth lab in his room. According to First Coast News , David Swindle was staying in the Pop Century resort over Labor Day weekend when he became upset with an employee—who are called cast members…

In 1979 David Lee Roth met Helmut Newton, inciting an ego-fueled power struggle that ultimately split the group apart Van Halen’s star was on the rise in late 1979. Vocalist David Lee Roth, bassist Michael Anthony, guitarist Eddie Van Halen, and drummer Alex Van Halen had sent sold out crowds into…

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in being a better cyber-citizen. Today, we discuss the various ins, outs, and what-have-you's of online dating. Case Study: On January 26, 2013, the greatest Twitter direct message of…

Photo: Getty Images Get Ask Polly delivered weekly. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy . Dear Polly, I feel like you get lots of letters from folks either starting out pursuing their passion, or looking for a passion to begin with, but here I am, midlife, mid-career,…

I’ve been going over what was said at Wednesday’s Republican debate , and I’m terrified. You should be, too. After all, given the vagaries of elections, there’s a pretty good chance that one of these people will end up in the White House. Why is that scary? I would argue that all of the G.O.P.…

About 20 minutes into The Reflektor Tapes, an inscrutable sorta-documentary about Arcade Fire’s 2013 album Reflektor and its support tour, frontman Win Butler ruminates off-camera about the challenge of reconciling the “philosophical, intellectual stuff I think about and the physicality of trying to…

They are all insane people. Even poor, stressed-out, occasionally lucid-seeming John Kasich: bonkers. Pathology is contextual, and one simply does not bring reasonable takes like Actually, the deal with Iran is okay, provided we do the diligence of enforcing it, just like pretty much every other…

Little Hannah Rucker’s robot is in for a beatdown. The girl's 60-pound wheeled blue rectangle, named Blue, is locked in a 1,600-square-foot polycarbonate box with a four-wheeled platform called UnMakerBot that spins a steel tube at unfathomable speed. UnMakerBot's pilot Zach Goff, a buff dude with…

This article has been corrected. We had met at a bar. I told him I was an economist. He told me he was a pot dealer. You might think we wouldn’t have had much to talk about. But the most exciting story in economics is one where an innovation disrupts a market and creates new ones. So once he said…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Credit Dan Winters for The New York Times I n the sleek, cold lobby of the Langham Place hotel in Midtown Manhattan, one of those thoroughly designed spaces in which one cannot find a right angle, much less a comfortable chair, the 68-year-old, 7-foot-2 former basketball star…

I am the ruler of worlds. Let me rephrase that: I am the ruler of one very small world of social media bots. My Twitter bots resemble real people, with photos for avatars and bios. Meet Fabiola Shaffer: She is pretty, has long brown hair, is a writer and researcher in New York and loves chocolate.…

Every week, the Criticwire Survey asks film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday morning. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?” can be found at the end of this post.) Send suggestions for future questions to sam at indiewire dot com. Q:…

So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that “ Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.” When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn’t yet…

Sealed inside a locked Los Angeles soundstage, clad head to toe in motion-capture equipment that tracks every muscle he moves, Nolan North senses that something is wrong. He’s just completed two takes of a 30-second scene, which PlayStation 4 players will see in six months or so as an in-game…

Earlier this month, in a post to his Facebook page, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his company’s instant messaging service is now used by more than 900 million people . And then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promptly responded with two posts of his own. One said “congrats,” and the other…

Gabriella Peñuela/FUSION If you live in the Bay Area and have looked for something special to spice up a birthday party, you might have discovered the Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express, a truck that promises to deliver an unbelievable selection of songs to your doorstep. You might have seen a review…

An improv class, an automobile crash test and your cousin’s home videos somehow interbred, and on Tuesday night the result turned up on NBC in the form of “Best Time Ever With Neil Patrick Harris,” a live variety show. How can three things interbreed? Hey, if you really want to reinvent something,…

Donald J. Trump arrived at the second Republican presidential debate dominating the field but facing a critical question: Would he use the moment to move beyond attention-grabbing theatrics and present himself as a candidate many voters could envision as the party’s nominee — not to mention as…

Hockey history is a rich tapestry of traditions, trends, and innovations. Many stuck around to become part of the game’s enduring fabric. Others … not so much. Today we will look back at one of the odder things that used to be part of the NHL’s culture and wonder how exactly it made sense at the…

So let's talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of…