Forgotify.com A home for the unloved tunes of Spotify Awhile back, Lane Jordan heard an interesting fact : Spotify, the streaming music service, said that 20% of the songs in their catalog had never once been played. That got Jordan, an interactive art director, feeling inspired — and so, along with…

Is it possible an unknown, one-woman toy-reviewing YouTuber called "Disney Collector" is making more money than most CEOs? Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed To 3-year-olds, she is an obsession. To their parents, a mystifying annoyance. To YouTube marketers, an elusive moneymaker no one's been able to tap for…

“One thing is for sure,” declared an influential American critic and record industry analyst, Bob Lefsetz, in a recent post on the topic of streaming music. “One service will dominate, it’s where we’ll all go, because we want to share, we don’t want to be left out.” Music is now undeniably an…

I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a…

Seventy miles northwest of Orlando International Airport, amid the sprawling, flat central Florida nothingness — past all of those billboards for Jesus and unborn fetuses and boiled peanuts and gator meat — springs up a town called Wildwood. Storefront churches. O’Shucks Oyster Bar. Family Dollar.…

“Want to meet at my dorm? Less carrying for me.” Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. the international sensation “mattress girl,” is emailing from her phone in her Columbia University dorm high up over Morningside Heights, where she lives in a single room within a six-person suite. “My friends and I got the…

Computers at Google now have a machine-learning system that can analyze images like the one above and generate captions for them. The phrase used to caption this image? “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road.” It might not seem like much, but it’s actually one hell of an accomplishment. First,…

D anny Ray Davis wasn’t just a fisherman, he was a champion. You’d know that had you ever seen him around Grand Prairie, Texas. They say he always wore the prize “$50,000 Winner” silk jacket he got for taking down the 1983 Texarkana Labor Day bass tournament. Davis was known as someone with a lot of…

S he tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore. “It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'” Fleischmann is a tall, thin,…

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE Captain Nick Sloane, salvage master, on the scene in Giglio, Italy, last summer; on the left, the cruise ship Costa Concordia two weeks before it was refloated., Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson. Every ocean voyage involves risk. This has always been, and will always be.…

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer ​ , the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of…

Published on June 3, 2015 NO ONE, LEAST OF ALL PRESIDENT OBAMA, had expected the conversation to take the turn that it did. The president, his speechwriter and a few top aides were supposed to be discussing Obama’s upcoming speech in Selma, Ala., in early March. Instead, they were talking about…

Few cultural symbols have as much heft as the "traditional" nuclear family. You know the one: two heterosexual parents, two kids, one dog, two tablespoons of white picket fence, whisk gently. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that—it's just not how I was raised. My parents are…

Mark Kozelek: ‘Wait ’til you see me up there [on stage]. You’re gonna be like a cat in heat.’ Photograph: Taylor Hill/Getty Images “Y ou think you’re the only person who wants to get a face-to-face interview with me? Get in line. I’m the best person you never met and one day, if you ever meet me,…

Photo credit: Christie Allen Mirror Mirror Photography Last Friday, part of Bill C-24 went into effect, officially creating a two-tier citizenship system. As a result of this new law, dual citizens and people who have immigrated to Canada can have their citizenship taken away while other Canadians…

Pronounce the word artist , to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist ,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our…

55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. Credit James Hill for The New York Times Читайте эту статью на русском. A round 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish,…

T he neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross. In late 2011, the Red Cross…

Two decades before Neil Patrick Harris dared to don a golden pair of go-go boots to portray the “internationally ignored song stylist” know as Hedwig Schmidt, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask were perfecting the act on the New York City drag scene. In the wake of Hedwig and the Angry Inch ‘s…

The video was obviously horrible: Fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma, jubilantly and drunkenly singing—to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”—“There will never be a nigger in SAE.” The song went on. “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign…

Sound is not permanent, and much of the recorded recent history of humanity is currently disintegrating. Robert Barry reports from the British Library Sound Archive and Internet Archive to find out what's being done to preserve these audio records, and explains what you can do to help We may not…

Warner Bros/Everett Collection Yes, indeed, The Godfather is masterful. The Sopranos ? We never missed an episode. But you want to talk about a movie that leaves a mark? Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas , the good people behind it—Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro!—re-create the making of the…

Francis Ford Coppola, at right, directs Marlon Brando and the cast in the wedding scene at the start of The Godfather. By Steve Schapiro. During the 1960s, a dirty, loaded word came into currency: Mafia. It signified one of the most terrifying forces on earth, the Italian-American faction of…

“They were old enough to know better, but too young to care. And now this town is... Over the Edge.” —From the theatrical trailer Richie (Matt Dillon) and Carl (Michael Kramer) being arrested by Sergeant Doberman (Harry Northup). In the spring of 1979, a small-budget movie with a somewhat…

GLORY-BOUND Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Travolta in 1994, shortly after Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with…

Union Cab Cars jam the Nines' loading zone on Southwest Morrison Street, so Berhan double parks his Prius. "What's up?" a doorman calls out as Berhan rolls down the window. "You have any customer?" Berhan asks. "No," the doorman says. He smacks his gum, impatient. "Uber and Lyft?" "Oh yeah," the…

The camera loves nothing the way it loves the desert. The sun across an uninterrupted sky; sand or clay swallowing up the light the same way it swallowed up the water. A desert suggests a story before anything enters the frame. It’s a landscape of the psyche that presents an essential cinematic…

Max Philipson CAÑAFISTOLA RANCH, Venezuela— With dozens of bird species nesting in its trees, congregations of caiman peering from its ponds, and 15-foot anacondas lurking by the roadside, the Venezuelan Llanos are one of the best spots to see wildlife in all of Latin America. Another reason it's…

Does that blog post header meet the standards of Buzzfeed? Not long ago I was asked this question in connection with a talk, but I didn’t have time to answer it: Suppose you had a time machine you that you solely wanted to use for financial gain. You can bring one item from the present back to any…

The President and others have praised the U.S.A. Freedom Act, but haven’t mentioned the blindingly obvious fact that without Edward Snowden the law wouldn’t exist. Photograph by CARSTEN REHDER / AFP / Getty Now that Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, the U.S.A. Freedom Act , which…

FLINT, MI -- It's been 25 years since Michael Moore introduced the world to his take on Flint, GM and corporate responsibility through his first documentary, "Roger & Me." The film, which premiered in film festivals in 1989, went on to become an international success. For the city, Michael Moore put…

I n 2012, two massive storms pounded the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks. Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the…

I went to Brooklyn, New York to visit Nina Freeman , who is currently making a game called Cibele . It is an autobiographical game about Nina’s experience having sex for the first time with someone she met through an online game. The game uses real filmed sequences and sections of an MMO-like game…

Rock sees his new film as a last chance. “If this doesn’t work, I can definitely see no one letting me direct a movie again,” he says. Photograph by Pari Dukovic In 1988, when Chris Rock had been doing standup comedy for four years, he took part in a special called “Comedy’s Dirtiest Dozen.” The…

When Audrey Hepburn starred in Roman Holiday in 1953, she was 23 years old. She had arrived in America from Europe a couple of years earlier, at a time when the very idea of a movie star was in flux. Marlon Brando and his Method-acting mob were charging out of New York’s Actors Studio and into…

Skip to main content You are here Home / Explore film & TV / Sight & Sound magazine / Sight & Sound articles / Polls and surveys Critics’ 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time What are the greatest documentaries ever made? We polled 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in the search for…

Photograph by Sebastian Meyer/Corbis. To the defense of Erbil: this was the main cause that drew President Obama back to combat in Iraq last week, two and a half years after he fulfilled a campaign pledge and pulled the last troops out. After Mazar-i-Sharif, Nasiriyah, Kandahar, Mosul, Benghazi, and…

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Last November, we published a story, ‘A Rape on Campus’ [RS 1223], that centered around a University of Virginia student’s horrifying account of her alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity house. Within days, commentators started to question the veracity of our narrative.…