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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…

McLovin will be out of luck (Photo: youngthousands/Flickr ) The past century has been a golden age of identification documents. As international travel and auto ownership boomed, so did the use of licenses and passports. And as the need for government-issued IDs grew, so did the demand for fake…

Game of Thrones is known for its excessive female nudity and gruesome violence. But we seldom dive deeper than that, to ask how the show polarizes female nakedness as either a presentation of empowerment or shame. On one hand, there is Daenerys Targaryen, wife of Khal Drogo and one of the last…

Run the Jewels: Killer Mike (left) and El-P.Photograph: Graeme Robertson BANKSY: Thanks for agreeing to play my theme park. Have you ever played in a theme park before? EL-P I have not yet had the pleasure of playing in a theme park, or enjoying one for that matter. KILLER MIKE I have not played a…

What is this thing? In essence it’s a festival of art, amusements and entry-level anarchism. A place where you can get your counterculture easily available over the counter. A theme park for the disenfranchised, with franchises available. I guess you’d say its a theme park whose big theme is – theme…

Jesse Wagstaff Living By on Aug 21, 2015 Share Get ready, folks! The most magical time of year is almost upon us. That’s right: Burning Man . Lest you mistake me for a tech billionaire with a penchant for fuzzy boots, hula hoops, group showers, and dudes named Dusty Unicorn — au contraire . The…

In the aftermath of a hack that revealed the identities of millions of users of the infidelity dating website Ashley Madison, people everywhere have faced an impossible question : should you find out whether someone you love has ever signed up for Ashley Madison? Do you even want to know? Samantha*,…

I can tell you about the moment I heard Pimp C was dead — Dec. 4, 2007; at work in my office at Vibe; nervously refreshing TMZ, which had broken the news; feeling nauseous. The room hummed with the white noise that takes over when you no longer register what’s happening around you. Minutes later, a…

B y Miami standards, the con pulled by Ibes Gomez seems minor. Small potatoes. Mostly just bad checks. A little hot paper to launch a tire business. Another bad check after a car sale went south. And also, yes, a few more checks, totaling an amount of some substance, that caught everyone’s attention…

The United States armed forces and its NATO allies are performing the biggest airborne drill training since the Cold War in response to further violence from pro-Russian forces in the eastern part of Ukraine. A total of 11 NATO nations and 5,000 soldiers are participating in the month-long drill in…

Who hasn't dreamed about making their own levels in a Mario game? Super Mario Maker is a bit of an answered prayer for every kid who grew up with graphing paper and a dream, and I've been able to spend a few days, and one intense night, with the game. Here's what I've learned. It's OK to be a…

Ashley Madison, FUSION When Tom found out last month that the infidelity dating website Ashley Madison had been hacked, he almost threw up. Tom had been using the site for years to cheat on his wife of over two decades. He immediately deleted his account and prayed that she would never find out.…

I had thought I’d seen the most shocking paparazzi assaults, the ones on Michael Jackson and Madonna, on the Kardashians and the Jolie-Pitts. But there are a couple of scenes in Asif Kapadia’s new Amy Winehouse documentary , Amy , that make the fame-industrial complex seem rock-bottom awful. They…

In Praise Of Spike Jonze, The Actor film still His role as blue collar good-ol'-boy Conrad Vig in Three Kings is one of the great examples of directors acting. In an alternate reality, Spike Jonze is preparing for Zoolander 2 , did one of Woody Allen's European movies (a good one), and has an Oscar…