Matthew Schimkowitz Author For as long as there have been movies, there have been attempts to get people into movie theaters. From barkers on street corners to teasers, TV spots, and trailers littering the special features of your Matrix DVD, movie marketing has evolved to let you know when and…

Vladimir V. Putin is great for television. And that’s not just because the Russian president is a former K.G.B. officer with a flair for grandiosity. Mr. Putin isn’t just a scuba-diving, Siberian-bear-hunting, bare-chested equestrian. He also acts like a Soviet-era potentate, repressing dissidents,…

Berkeley, Calif. THE three most lucrative college football teams in 2005 — Notre Dame, Ohio State and the University of Texas — each generated more than $60 million for their institutions. That number, which comes from the Department of Education, fails to account for the millions of dollars alumni…

Google Maps On an American territory some 5,000 miles from the mainland, locals are debating what it would mean to become American citizens—and whether that would threaten local laws. Where exactly is American Samoa and how is it related to the rest of America? The territory is made up of a group of…

How It’s Made Series: Beats By Dre

The sneaky designers at Beats by Dre employ a clever trick to make you think that the company’s plastic headphones are durable products worth the premium price. Beats by Dre headphones are garbage . Besides their crappy sound, they’re basically designed to break. And yet they sell millions of pairs…

Michael Lewis [photo: Robert Birnbaum] In the course of my prolonged post graduate education (and adolescence) I have been privileged to discourse with countless accomplished, talented, creative and socially conscious people—some a number of times. I may have lost count, but the conversation (my…

(Image: George Pimentel/Getty Images) Jian Ghomeshi and I first met in February of 1999. I was in my early 20s, and I’d just been hired as an arts reporter at the Globe and Mail . My editor sent me to interview the band Moxy Früvous, who had been gigging around Toronto since I was in high school.…

Warring clans (cable vs. broadband) battle over unfathomable riches (revenues of $5.4 billion last year) and golden idols (Emmys), with fire-breathing dragons circling overhead (oh, wait, that's just Nic Pizzolatto). Now, the network chiefs reveal the dramatic boardroom backstory on how "HB-Over"…

Two Dissolve writers keep the Aliens conversation going... Scott: Maybe the best place to start with Aliens is its conceptual audacity. James Cameron made a sequel to one of the great modern horror movies, and turned it into an action film. In Alien , a single creature took out the crew of an entire…

From Moviestore Collection/Rex/REX USA. In designing the future, the team was able to flex their creative muscles. It’s true that “not Blade Runner ” can only be carried so far as an edict, but Bob Gale’s screenplay provided valuable clues as to how the Bobs, [Gale and director Robert Zemeckis],…

If my childhood self could pick a mission statement, it would probably be, “What does this button do?” I was hardwired to engage in dumb experiments and deal with the consequences later. My teenage brain was constantly tormented by questions that had no real-life value. A sampling: “If I hold this…

Technology: Shutdown of pagers shows critical role orbiters play in consumers' lives. But firms still intend to launch new array of services. In the 50 years since legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke proposed the idea of bouncing communications signals off a relay station in space,…

Since their inception 60 years ago, satellites have gone on to become an indispensable component of our modern high-tech civilization. But because they’re reliable and practically invisible, we take their existence for granted. Here’s what would happen if all our satellites suddenly just…

David Ramos/Getty Images Uber is using GPS on drivers' phones to identify, and threaten, drivers loitering by taxi protests in China, the Wall Street Journal reports. For months, there's been tension in the country between ride-share companies and taxi drivers, who fear the new companies will make…

For the rest of his life, Steve Harwell will forever be known as ‘the dude from Smash Mouth.’ Every time he places an order at Starbucks, the barista will remember those little record-scratching noises in the middle of “All Star.” As he hobbles around his future granddaughter’s college graduation in…

WASHINGTON — The United States has transferred six lower-level detainees from the prison at Guantánamo Bay , Cuba, where each had been held for more than 13 years, the military announced early Saturday. The departures, to Oman , were the first from the prison in six months and reduced the inmate…

Any parent of a four-to-x-year-old will likely understand this week’s cover. Most everyone else will probably be confused. Minecraft is a video game invented, in 2009, by Markus Persson (a.k.a. “Notch” to the seven hundred trillion humans who play it), as a sort of intuitive reimagining of the…

If rap music were healthy, would it need a defender, much less a white one? Photograph by Daniel Arnold One of the most influential hosts on hip-hop radio is a man named Peter Rosenberg. He is thirty-four years old and stocky, with a few days of stubble and a you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit approach to…

The popularity of Moleskine notebooks seems to defy the widespread worship of technological innovations coming out of Silicon Valley. PHOTOGRAPH BY TON KOENE/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/AP Last summer in Toronto, I found myself at a Demo Day, one of those tech-industry events where eager representatives of a…

Photograph by Amanda Edwards / WireImage / Getty Months after Run the Jewels’ El-P and Killer Mike pledged to remix their acclaimed “Run the Jewels 2” using only cat samples, El-P took to Twitter to offer up a preview of “Meow the Jewels” and announce that the reworked LP had secured a very special…

On Monday, Killer Mike posted to Instagram asking residents to vote for him in a write-in for the Georgia state representative. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, considering Mike's politics are well-documented and he's never been shy about speaking out for his beliefs. (Back in November, he…

Glenne Headly and Warren Beatty. From Moviestore Collection/Rex/REX USA. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was seen as a vanguard for superhero movies in 2008: a massive box office success that also earned a staggering eight Academy Award nominations and eventually won two. But Nolan’s second…

The Lost World is about to make good on its title. When viewers head to the theater to watch Jurassic World this weekend, they’ll find a movie that transports them, almost literally, back to the first Jurassic Park . Colin Trevorrow’s new film is a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original — and…

Photo: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images Early reviews of the new Amy Winehouse documentary Amy , directed by Asif Kapadia (2010’s Senna ), are overwhelmingly positive , but as our Jada Yuan pointed out after seeing it for the first time at Cannes, it’s complicated . Some of Winehouse’s closest friends…

Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in our pockets, runs our cars and homes, and dominates our waking lives, ignorance is no longer…

John Lennon and Paul McCartney This article is part of a series on creative pairs. To read the introduction, click here . To read the first part of the Beatles essay, click here . "It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again" —Paul McCartney It's supremely odd how history…

Life in America requires a lot of advance preparation. For instance, when you’re getting ready for a plane trip you imagine what you’ll do if a problem arises — flight delay, long lines at security. But I bet you haven’t considered the best way to react if the man in front of you on the airport…

How a stolen piece of vinyl and a primitive drum machine inspired a young Chicago DJ to invent a new genre by Jesse Saunders The whole thing started with a drum machine. In the summer of 1983, I was living in Chicago and DJing every Friday/Saturday night at one of the biggest clubs in town, The…

Harmonix is putting a PC version of the latest Rock Band game on the back burner, and one reason is the music industry's fear of piracy . Putting music on a game in this way is a scary thing for record labels who are nervous about losing control of the source material. Which brings us to the strange…

Ed Brubaker: "Scott Pilgrim's" Bryan Lee O'Malley Goes For "Seconds" - Comic Book Resources http://t.co/yDS0QwO4Yo via @cbr

April 16, 2013 By Gene Demby | Cover photo by Alyson B rooklyn Park, Minn., which sits just to the northwest of Minneapolis and hugs the Mississippi River, was once the quintessential American suburb: Pretty sleepy. Midwestern. Mostly white. Jesse Ventura, the garrulous former Minnesota governor and…

“It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream, or a nightmare,” says Orson Welles in the opening narration of his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial . He seems to be talking specifically about a brief parable he’s just related from the novel—an allegorical tale about…

Iggy Azalea performs at Universal Music Group Artist’s Showcase in February in Los Angeles. (Eric Charbonneau/Invision for Universal Music Group/AP) Stick a fork in Iggy Azalea. She’s done. Or is she? It was just a year ago that Azalea’s “Fancy” was being heralded as the song of the summer, but the…

Pryor enlightened his audience on race and interracial relationships using a flamboyant vocabulary that he’d learned growing up in his grandmother’s whorehouse. Illustration by Al Hirschfeld, Courtsey of the Margo Feiden Galleries LTD SKIN FLICK Winter, 1973. Late afternoon: the entr’acte between…