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…

(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com ) In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. “Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties,” the former CIA officer writes in Circle of…

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…

SASIMOTO / Shutterstock / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic On Aug. 18, 2011, a thread titled “I design tampons. AMA!” appeared on the news-conversation website Reddit. Hosted by a user named “karnim” who identified himself only as a college-aged male research-and-development intern at one of the “big…

Research In Motion’s Jim Balsillie, left, and Mike Lazaridis in 2006. Photo: Norm Betts/Bloomberg News Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw the televised report about Apple Inc.’s AAPL 0.79% newest product. Research In Motion ’s BB 1.36% founder soon forgot about exercise that day in…

Production company DPPLR created a (vintage) sci-fi short called Rotor about a security guard in an eerie factory that spots an intruder on one of his monitors. The plot somewhat reminds us of Moon in which a guy on the moon discovers different versions of himself. DPPLR made the film for the fun…

Editor: When software developer Brad Isaac told us he had productivity advice from Jerry Seinfeld, we couldn't turn down the chance to hear more. Read on for the whole story from Brad. Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was…

I love documentaries. I can watch a documentary about anything. But I didn’t have much interest in this one —I’ve had my fill of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana bios and documentaries, and stopped reading and watching them a long time ago. I don’t have a lot of happy memories about any of that stuff, and…

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…

How a veteran turntable technician embraced DJ technology By DJ Rob Swift T he first time I saw someone using a laptop to DJ was around 2001 at a DJ school. The X-Ecutioners had been invited as guests and already the idea of going to a DJ school and people paying to be taught how to DJ tripped me…

Apple’s Eddy Cue high fives Drake during the Apple Music introduction at the Apple WWDC on June 8, 2015 in San Francisco Apple wants to be the music kingmaker. Is that possible in the Internet age? I had long imagined Apple’s introduction of a streaming music service. It’s been clear for years that…

“Capturing the Friedmans” (2003) In the summer of 1987, parents in a quiet Long Island suburb got a rude awakening: Their kids’ extracurricular computer teacher had been arrested for pedophilia. Immediately, disturbing stories began to emerge of children being forced into bizarre sex games in the…

72 The 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven left me confused, enthralled, and feeling the need to upgrade my threads. This is the goal for most heist movies: the audience should be as dazzled as the in-film mark, hoodwinked but with begrudging respect. The missteps should be uncloaked as part of the plan…

More from the archives, this time a 2007 piece on the dark eroticism inherent in The Sims, penned by the sorely-missed RPS co-founder and giant of words Kieron Gillen. It was the phone calls that made me certain. The Sims was going to cross over, one way or another. I worked in a cramped games…

A mysterious little book called Iterating Grace is floating around San Francisco right now. At least a dozen people have received the book in the mail—or in my case, by secret hand-delivery to my house . (Which is a little creepy.) The artifact itself consists of a 2,001-word story interspersed with…

Photo by 4774344sean/Thinkstock No judgment, but you waste a lot of time on the internet, right? Which means sometime in the past year or so, something like this happened: You’re on Facebook, and you see that a friend has shared an interesting-looking article, such as a map of the United States with…