Quentin Tarantino. Photo: Amanda Demme In Conversation : Quentin Tarantino Midway throughpostproduction onhis eighth movie,the Western THE HATEFUL EIGHT — about a band ofoutlaws trapped ina saloon duringa blizzard — the directordiscusses the country’s legacy of whitesupremacy, Obama,and why he…

It was early July , about nine weeks before the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and we were sitting in his temporary office above a BMW dealership on the far west side of Manhattan. He looked very tired, and he was apologizing (unnecessarily) for rambling on in a way that was maybe a…

“C lean this place up! And go find some incense!” Mac Miller is in the throes of his Miguel story. It starts with a back-and-forth Twitter DM conversation with the singer, a conversation that almost convinced him to send part of his yet-to-be-finished new album, GO:OD AM , to someone who had hacked…

Radical Self-Expression The weeklong Burning Man festival takes place once a year over Labor Day weekend in a remote alkali flat in northwestern Nevada. Two hours north of Reno, the inhospitable Black Rock Desert seems a poor place to create a temporary sixty-thousand-person city — and yet that’s…

matt buchanan hello, sincerely The Awl Be less stupid.

American Ultra , the high-spies actioner that dropped this past weekend, is a strapping example of so many trends in the movie industry right now. With a dismal $5.5 million opening across 2,778 screens, it’s an example of how hard it is to open an original property without the names Christopher…

When sifting through the catalogue of illustrious French filmmakers, the pioneers and precursors to the French New Wave, those creators of a new cinematic language, immediately pop out. You know the ones; Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Robert Bresson , et al. Put them in a single…

Last night, Jon Stewart — beloved liberal media icon — appeared for the first time on cable television since leaving behind the desk of “The Daily Show” three weeks ago. But he wasn’t on a major news outlet, discussing issues of the day. Instead, he was on “Monday Night Raw,” being confronted by…

Amazon employees entering the company’s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working. They are…

Plumbing Trump’s psyche is as productive as asking American Pharoah why he runs. The point is what happens when he does. Illustration by Christoph Niemann On July 23rd, Donald Trump’s red-white-and-navy-blue Boeing 757 touched down in Laredo, Texas, where the temperature was climbing to a hundred…

Jump to navigationJump to search Coordinates: 73°48′26″N 54°58′54″E  /  73.80722°N 54.98167°E  / 73.80722; 54.98167 Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бо́мба , tr. Tsar'-bómba , IPA: [t͡sarʲ ˈbombə] , lit. Tsar bomb/King of Bombs ) was the Western nickname for the Soviet RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (code name…

Victims of Hurricane Katrina argue with National Guard Troops as they try to get on buses headed to Houston on Sept. 1, 2005. Photo by Willie Allen Jr./St. Petersburg Times via ZUMA Wire On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in 2010, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu preached unity . “With…

For the past week, international media has reported on the hack of extramarital site Ashley Madison and its parent company Avid Life Media, which has affected potentially tens of millions of site users, as well as spewed the alleged source code of the company's products onto the dark web. The…

Omar Bustamante/Fusion Last month, a group calling itself the "Impact Team" announced that it had hacked Avid Life Media, the parent company of infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, and stolen the company's financial and membership records. But by the time security blogger Brian Krebs broke the…

Skip to content 0 The Shop View Cart(0) Login × Looking for something? Type something to see the thing you're actually looking for Looking for something? Type something to see the thing you're actually looking for Recent Issues Issue one hundred twenty The Music Issue August/September 2018 read…

A group of writers has put forth what antitrust experts describe as a highly unorthodox argument: that, even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS RATCLIFFE / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY For months,…

By Columbus Alive • Enlarge Image Five years after his posthumous final album, King of Hearts, friends and colleagues recall ‘a rapper’s rapper’ In Borgloon, Belgium, there sits a church. Designed by architect Gijs Van Vaerenbergh and comprised of layers of stacked, staggered steel, the building’s…

Mark Wallheiser Last week, 30,000 people gathered in Mobile, Ala. to hear Donald Trump share his views on immigration ("We're the only place just about that's stupid enough to do [birthright citizenship]"); women's rights (“I will protect women; it’s so important to me”); his competition in the GOP…

Aug. 10, 2015 marked the demise of one of the most storied pieces of late-20 th -century cultural detritus, the mail-order CD club. The owners of Columbia House filed for bankruptcy on Monday , and several generations of American youth sighed with relief at the revelation that their debts were…

Navid Khonsari grew up in Iran until the age of ten, when the revolution that swept the country drove his family to Canada. After working on celebrated titles like Grand Theft Aut o and Max Payne at Rockstar, Khonsari put his skills to use at iNK Stories, a new media company he co-founded that…

Over the past five years, psychological research — some involving real terrorist suspects — has shown how to get information from people who don’t want to talk. Now Washington has the chance to put these findings into practice. YouTube / Via youtube.com A scene from Zero Dark Thirty Hollywood has a…

O n July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service…

Limbo isn’t a straightforward adventure. It’s confusing. But it’s a good kind of confusing that inspires people to band together and try to solve its mysteries. It was first released in 2010 for Xbox Live , and since then, it’s been ported to nearly every platform imaginable . This month, the folks…

The Virtual Boy and its controller Photo: Benj Edwards Twenty years ago, on August 21, 1995, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in North America. The stilt-legged tabletop gaming console, which offered a unique red stereoscopic 3D display, attempted to ride a wave of popular interest in virtual…

Special Topics In Gameology explores a specific corner of the gaming world in a miniseries of articles. The current theme is commerce , in which we examine games’ representation and use of business and trade. Niko Bellic is a man frozen in place. When he arrives in Liberty City, he’s alone,…

For Dr. Dre, this summer was meant to be a victory lap in a successful career. “ Straight Outta Compton ,” a biopic about his hip-hop group , N.W.A., topped the box office last week with a $56.1 million opening. “ Compton ,” his first album in 16 years, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard chart. Last…

On June 3, 2010, six men filed through the weedy, Soviet-era campus of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, in Moscow. They made their way past friends, family, scientists, well-wishers and a bronze-toned, gigantic statue of the astronaut Yuri Gagarin before entering a vaulted hall that contained a…

Introduction by Banksy Dismaland is the latest innovation in family light entertainment by the graffiti artist Banksy. Installed in the centre of an unfashionable British seaside town frequented by low-income families, Banksy describes it as “the perfect art audience.” The location is a former lido…

Is there anything more tragic than the last leave-taking between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze (his very own “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”)? They meet in the dreary shack where she has removed herself to become a ground-down baby machine for some prole. Not only does she tell…

The First World War was instigated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but it’s no small miracle that a general European war didn’t happen earlier. Here are 7 international crises in the years before 1914 that could have started a global-scale conflict. For most Europeans, the century…

A screenshot from 'Resident Evil 2 Reborn', via Facebook It's invariably been the dream of every gamer who's sat up late, frustrated that their favourite game didn't have a feature they had hoped for, to eventually do what developers could not. In our fantasies, we concoct a world where Half-Life 3…

The ancient Library of Alexandria may have been the largest collection of human knowledge in its time , and scholars still mourn its destruction. The risk of so devastating a loss diminished somewhat with the advent of the printing press and further still with the rise of the Internet. Yet…

Digging a tunnel is tough work. Digging a 26-mile, 20-foot wide train tunnel under one of the oldest and most complicated cities in Europe? That's really tricky. Underground London is filled with sewers, utility tunnels, building foundations and more, not to mention a massive Underground network.…

The Hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it. It’s starting to look a little less…

If you’ve ever Googled “the history of the blow job,” you’ve no doubt encountered a slew of things, including perhaps a visit from HR. But depending on how willing you are to go down on your list of search results, there’s a juicy bit of oral history you may not have uncovered: the role that the mob…

Sex appears in my inbox at least once a month. We all occasionally wonder if we’re normal, especially when it comes to the most private parts of our lives. This week, after I received two questions from readers about their masturbation habits (something I’ve quantified before by age, frequency and…

Here’s my bet about the future of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Israeli relations: If they don’t end their long-running conflicts, Mother Nature is going to destroy them all long before they destroy one another. Let me point out a few news items you may have missed while debating the…

The small package was wrapped in Chinese newspaper when it arrived, protecting a thin light blue jewelry box holding a beaded bracelet. But the bracelet was cheap. What was important was hidden under a layer of foam: fake driver’s licenses. The 19-year-old sophomore who ordered the IDs had tired of…

When Tom Cruise had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report , the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped out his eyeballs. CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. But meanwhile, they’ve got to come up with something…