The House Always Wins: “Croupier” and the Thrill of the Invisible Heist by Daniel Carlson Croupier almost shouldn’t work. Directed by Mike Hodges from a script by Paul Mayersberg, and starring Clive Owen in one of his first leading roles, the 1998 film is a gray, uncompromising number that doesn’t…

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Drive through the sprawl of any big Brazilian city and there they are, the short-stay love motels beckoning with their neon lights and names like Magnata and Taj Mahal . Some resemble colossal medieval fortresses for trysts. Others evoke ancient Egypt’s Pharaonic excesses . But…

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl a video game by GSC Game World S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky a video game by GSC Game World S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat a video game by GSC Game World Mary Evans/MOSFILM/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection Nikolai Grinko as ‘Professor,’ Alexander Kaidanovsky as…

For all that it does well, it has failed to help artists take the next steps in connecting with fans Next week brings a major milestone for Apple Music — three months after launch, free trials will start running out and users will have to decide whether it is worth $9.99 a month to stick with the…

“When it comes to probing questions about their intimate life as computer-game players, most people don’t have much to say,” writes Michael W. Clune in his absorbing new memoir Gamelife . “They’ve never thought about it. Or they’ve repressed it. Or they’ve forgotten. Or they’re embarrassed. Society…

My mother’s address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as…

Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall” — the theme to the next James Bond film, Spectre — finally hit the Internet today, and opinions are mixed. The Guardian referred to it as sounding like an X Factor song, which is the worst thing you can say about music in England short of claiming the song in…

Getty Images Speaker John Boehner, who recently compared his job leading the House's Republican majority to collecting garbage and being in prison , announced on Friday that he will be resigning his speakership and his seat in Congress at the end of October. As the New York Times first reported ,…

Atomic212 Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, excited consumers all around the world wait in line for days , braving wind and rain and obnoxious tech reporters in order to be among the first to purchase the year's hot gadget. This year, however, a woman sent a robot to wait in line for her .…

How a meeting with David Bowie and a chance reunion with the band marked the start of his solo career by Aidan Levy It had been exactly one year and eighteen days since Lou left the Velvets. The moment was indelibly etched in his consciousness. This was his own private 45, and it sent him spiraling…

The most fanciful thing about ABC’s muppetational but seldom celebrational The Muppets is that the late-night talk show behind whose scenes it takes place has a female host. In this regard, I support its vision. I support nothing else about The Muppets except the pilot’s use of the great Jere Burns,…

Stephanie Keith / Reuters In 2006, a blogger named Charles Lavoie argued that every New Yorker cartoon—from bears-waiting-in-an-elevator to two-old-businessmen-playing-with-dolls—could be aptly captioned “Christ, what an asshole!” Lavoie was correct: They totally could. He documented the rewritten…

History was in open rebellion in Dumbo the other day. Cars had fins, and men wore boxy suits. Pacing up and down the block was a tall septuagenarian named Lenny Shiller, from Midwood, Brooklyn. He was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Bridge of Spies”—about a U.S.-Soviet prisoner swap at…

Yogi Berra died last night at the age of 90. We’ll get to Berra the quote machine shortly. First, let’s start with Berra the baseball player. Because, man, could he play. It’s enough of a grind being a catcher in today’s game. But the demands placed on players in Berra’s era were especially cruel.…

If there were an award for feeling most conflicted about porn, I’d take the cake, or maybe the creampie. Despite peddling sex and other bodily wares in various capacities for almost a decade, I’m not so keen on porn, at least the mainstream stuff. It feels reductive and hollow—an apologist for the…

Harman, the manufacturers of the pre-eminent monochrome film brand Ilford have been bought out by a UK-based investment company Harman Technology, the manufacturers of the Ilford Photo range of monochrome photographic products, has been purchased by Pemberstone Ventures Ltd for an undisclosed…

1 On ParkLife ’s Kaytranada -curated stage Sango is dropping some heavy bass. He’s probably not aware of how much he’s shaking up the Portakabin that’s acting as BadBadNotGood ’s dressing room for the afternoon. It’s still fairly early in the clearing of trees that boasts the best line-up of the…

There’s one tiny detail in Resident Evil 2 which illustrates, perfectly, what I love about the game. On the balcony overlooking the main hall is the operation switch for an emergency ladder, which the player can choose to activate. It creates a shortcut between the ground floor reception and the…

Yesterday, Nintendo celebrated the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. release in Japan on September 13th, 1985. The anniversary of the game release in the United States won't be quite as simple, because nobody knows exactly when Super Mario Bros. made its way here. In 2012, former games…

“It’s the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer!” screamed a middle-aged man in an oxford shirt as I entered the main lawn on which the first-ever official Catalina Wine Mixer was being held. “Pow!” someone screamed back as they passed. Yes. This would be where wings take dream, I thought. The main lawn on…

On Oct. 9, 1986, Air Force One delivered President Ronald Reagan to Iceland, where he met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. The Reykjavik summit, as it was known, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The Boeing 707 that was the primary Reagan-era Air Force One is now…

In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site , host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale human avatar with frosted fuchsia tips and a soul patch. Motion-captured from the show’s second host backstage, he swivels from side to…

by Joe Berkowitz and Hallie Bateman Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of…

A dispute in California over whether Uber’s drivers are employees or contractors shows that labor laws that were passed decades ago just don’t work in the smartphone world. But it’s not just about the workplace. This litigation is becoming a Rorschach test for people’s views of the sharing economy…

WIRED Sixteen days into my social media sabbatical last month, I cheated. I was looking for an email address I couldn’t find, and I knew the guy I wanted to reach was active on Twitter. I logged on and tweeted at him. Presto, he got right back to me. So did another friend, with a one-word dm:…

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…