The hobby of collecting classic videogames has gained quite a lot of popularity in recent years, with more and more people (your author included) spending their free time hunting down game cartridges of yesteryear. Of the classic game machines of old, the original Nintendo Entertainment System has…

The devil in this particular equation? “Legitimacy.” Today news broke that the UFC parted ways with one of their most recognizable figures . Not a fighter, not a commentator, not even a referee—but rather, a cutman by the name of Jacob “Stitch” Duran. Cutmen play a massively important role in the…

Composed almost entirely of sampled content lifted from vinyl records, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing is something of a crate digger’s bible. Eliot Wilder reflects on the landmark hip-hop album, nearly two decades on from its original release . Words: Eliot Wilder When it was released in 1996,…

I like to buy games on day one. I’m not a fan of pre-owned, because I’d rather see my money go to the people who made a video game than the retailer that’s selling it, and also when I’ve been looking forward to a game for months or years I quite often don’t want to wait any longer because I have…

T he boarding procedure has barely started at Chicago O’Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he’s passing out a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight…

President Obama during the singing of Amazing Grace on Friday in Charleston I think Barack Obama’s eulogy yesterday for parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was his most fully successful performance as an orator. It was also one that could have come only at…

I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold. Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio…

I’m a fan of Glenn Thrush. For me, he is in Politico but not of it . But I think he gets this take on Obama , coming off his fractious and steely Iran deal press conference, simply wrong. The image is of a president frantically trying to cram as much legacy as he can into the final quarter of his…

Kent Hernandez/FUSION Of all the ups and downs that I've had in my dating life, the most humiliating moment was having to explain to Siri that I got dumped. "Siri, John isn't my boyfriend anymore," I confided to my iPhone, between sobs. “Do you want me to remember that John is not your boyfriend…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it? By Hossein Derakhshan Illustrations by Tim McDonagh S even months ago , I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building…

Arturo Hernández/Demotix/Corbis The end of the nearly one-mile tunnel through which drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera escaped, Almoloya de Juárez, Mexico, July 12, 2015 Within a few hours of his relaxed escape from Mexico’s highest security prison early Saturday evening, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better…

The Fight Over Plastic Bags Is About a Lot More Than How to Get Groceries Home Photographs by Bobby Doherty Lauren Kuby had a simple ambition: She wanted to get something done. Kuby works by day at a sustainability institute that’s part of Arizona State University in Tempe, but last year she decided…

On a green hill overlooking the tree-lined perimeter of Daejeon, a city in central South Korea, a machine gun turret idly scans the horizon. It’s about the size of a large dog; plump, white and wipe-clean. A belt of bullets – .50 calibre, the sort that can stop a truck in its tracks – is draped over…

by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite In the fall of 1949, the editors of Esquire magazine published Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, billed as the “all-time, all-knowing, all-inclusive, all-man reference book on ‘Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.’” The Handbook included recipes, drink ideas, games, decorating tips,…

A lot has changed since 1997. I remember the moment I realized what the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII would actually entail. I was thirteen, and I nervously checked to see if anyone else was home. Being trans brought with it this odd sense of obligation to protect a secret that at the…

Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous is a small-scale feminist science fiction movie that couches pointed critique in a deftly-realized story. It’s a film about a woman who makes an irreversible decision for the good of her daughter, set against a backdrop of ambiguous terrorist conflict and entrenched…

The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Map by Ziggymaj / Getty When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in…

Niko Bellic, the lead character in Grand Theft Auto IV. O nce upon a time I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down "only" a thousand words. Once upon a time I…

I n a fluorescent-lit hallway at a Long Island nursing home, Judd Apatow sits on an overturned box beside a collapsed wheelchair, marking a two-page printout of jokes. It’s 8:40 a.m. on May 19th, 2014: the first day of production on Apatow’s fifth directorial feature, Trainwreck. Residents mill…

While it’s easy to conclude Oliver Stone has hit a rough patch after the lukewarm reviews and box-office performances of features such as “W.” and “ Savages ,” acclaimed filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (“ Man Push Cart ,” “ Chop Shop “) and critic Matt Zoller Seitz think otherwise. The two are more than…

The Myth of the Ethical Shopper Michael Hobbes There’s this video that went viral earlier this year. On Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, a vending machine is selling plain white T-shirts for €2 each. Customers approach in ones and twos, insert coins, pick a size. Then, before the shirt comes out, a photo…

As the popularity of Bitcoins has increased, government officials are concerned about criminal activity associated with the virtual currency. But a recent subpoena issued by the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs to 19-year-old Bitcoin developer and MIT student Jeremy Rubin goes too far, and…

Security hawks will no doubt pan the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran that’ll be signed in Vienna today. They’ll say that it won’t prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — and they’ll be right. They’ll say that Zoolcar9 / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND it’ll help Iran build its conventional…

A revolution began Monday night in the world of women’s athletics. To be fair, the women involved are called divas , this particular realm of athletics goes by the winking nom de plume of sports entertainment , and the revolution was sanctioned—orchestrated, even—by those called, without a dash of…

Many of us have been criminally overlooking one of the greatest hip-hop acts of all time Last year , when De La Soul made its entire catalog available for free in celebration of the 25th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising , I jumped at the opportunity to grab the albums I didn’t have. More…

Robert Smith, lead singer for The Cure, once remarked that the idea of reinvention was bizarre. Philly singer/songwriter Aaron Livingston would disagree. The man who made a name for himself lending his beautifully dour vocals to tracks with The Roots and, most famously, producer RJD2 for a joint…

When I interviewed Laura Poitras for “ Citizenfour ,” I asked about how the U.S. government kept harassing her whenever she entered the country as well as foreign airports. More than 50 times over six years, in fact, she had to undergo repeated searches and interrogations. Her ongoing treatment…

VIENNA — Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States reached a historic accord on Tuesday to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions. The deal culminates 20 months of negotiations on an agreement…

The first video game I ever fell in love with had no graphics whatsoever. It was all text, and text alone: dim green, amber, or white characters on a dark background—that’s all the earliest monitors could handle. It was a game from the mid-eighties, based on the Douglas Adams novel, “The…

[ edit July 12: when you’re done here, I wrote a followup for you: Fixing or Replacing Reddit, some quick thoughts — take a look! chuq ] Two or three times a year I get asked why I don’t use Reddit, typically from someone telling me about all of the great stuff on it. They’re right, there are a lot…

Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Illustration by Brian Stauffer In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new…

Avengers: Age of Ultron 's pace is relentless. Get distracted by an explosion, a shiny object or a pretty, cantilevered staircase, and you could lose the narrative thread that unfolds as fast as Quicksilver runs. Spoiler alert: This article assumes you've seen Avengers: Age of Ultron . If you…

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece called “ Ranking Every Jurassic World Character From Dumbest to Least Dumb .” The response to the article was generally positive; some folks who enjoyed Jurassic World even conceded that, yes, the people in it are pretty dopey. But there was a small vocal minority…

It all started innocently enough. Near the conclusion of 2008’s Iron Man , James “Rhodey” Rhodes pauses for a moment and turns to his right. There, on display, is the War Machine getup. The audience unites together as we ask ourselves, “Are we getting this now ?” It’s as though Rhodey hears our…

By Chris Kanthan/ nationofchange.org / Jul 6, 2015 Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money…

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon (AP Photo/Reed Saxon) In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These…

On July 13, 1990, the first album to be adorned with a parental advisory sticker hit the shelves, ushering in a new era in the recording industry and re-igniting a heated discussion about censorship, freedom of speech, and morality. Banned in the U.S.A. was 2 Live Crew’s fourth album, and certainly…