…and it sounds like Vitamin D for the soul Act I It’s not everyday you run into Chance The Rapper. Sure, you might bump into him at the airport as he’s coming or going. You might even catch him at an event, with a sea of people following him through the crowd as if he’s our rap savior. But with his…

“His theory is that there’s been a rock opera for every generation since Tommy and The Wall , and the millennials really haven’t had a rock opera. So he hopes it will be Fight Club .” Author Chuck Palahniuk is on the other end of the phone, and I’m struggling to match the calm, thoughtful voice I’m…

Street artist Shepard Fairey and MTV, home to teen moms and teen wolves, are the Felix and Oscar of American culture wars. That they found common ground is something of a triumph. Their web series, Rebel Music , now in its second season , spotlights creative young people who express themselves in a…

B y the time I arrive for my interview backstage at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, hours before the second show of a 70-date world tour that U2 launched there in the middle of May, one of the world’s most famous and tenured rock bands is the talk of all media. But it’s not for the state-of-the-art stage…

A day after leaving the “Fast and Furious” franchise, Justin Lin got a curious phone call. Lin, who had directed four of the street racing-themed action movies, was asked by Google to collaborate on a very different kind of film project: one that would be available only on mobile phones, and force…

Rap lyrics sure ain’t what they used to be By GZA M usic is forever changing. Hip-hop is not going to be what it was 15 or 20 years ago. Everything changes. There are different sounds, different dances. But at the end of the day, to me it’s all about the lyrics. Hip-hop started with street poets…

Evan Spiegel begins a conversation in the offices of his startup, Snapchat, by propping a sneakered foot onto an Eames chair, leaning back, and acknowledging how infrequently he speaks to the press. “I literally have not done this in so long,” he says, before taking a sip from something called a…

How six female singers and a British alt-pop hero pushed back against misogyny through music By Sarah Gooding Ian Parton’s music production process has always been largely solitary. As the mastermind of The Go! Team, a rambunctious pop project that marries meticulously spliced samples with vigorous…

The Eric Andre Show is the acid trip of the late night circuit. With surreal clips of Andre lighting himself on fire, egging on Buddha and Jesus to beat one another, and chainsawing his penis off, one must wonder: how does he do it? Between scaring make-up counter girls and scarring celebrities,…

Google recently announced that their self-driving car has driven more than a million miles. According to Morgan Stanley, self-driving cars will be commonplace in society by ~2025. This got me thinking about the ethics and philosophy behind these cars, which is what the piece is about. Source: Morgan…

Given that red hair occurs naturally in 1-2% of the population, it makes sense the MC1R protein mutation enjoys a mystique denied its arguably more prosaic cousins. Triss ( The Witcher series) , Ellie ( The Last of Us), Black Widow ( Avengers )—within comics and videogames especially, red-headed…

Rust , a 2013 indie survival game from Facepunch Studios , plays like a cross between Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto. Players find themselves “born” into a mysterious wilderness, naked and alone , forced to forage for resources and to craft clothing, supplies and shelter for themselves. They must…

If you’re like most people on Instagram, you’ll scroll through all 22 filters, carefully consider the nuances of Inkwell vs. Lo-Fi vs. Hudson, and then settle on one of the filters you always use. Oh sure, there are so many filters, but you always go back to your favorites “just because.” Turns out…

A handsome, troubled man rescues a beautiful woman (who also happens to be a badass driver) from servitude, and “she rescues him right back”. The plot of Mad Max: Fury Road . Except I’m actually describing the plot of Pretty Woman . A woman with a background of abuse uses her hard-won position to…

Share How a group of college students made gaming history at the dawn of personal computing and computer networks. It started as an experiment. Steve Colley had just figured out how to rotate a cube on the screen when Howard Palmer suggested they could make a three-dimensional maze. The year was…

April 21st, 2015 Culture Reddit Social Media Week is a leading news platform and worldwide conference that curates and shares the best ideas and insights into social media and technology's impact on business, society, and culture. We’re an enigma, those of us born at the tail end of the 70s and the…

When the film adaption of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross opened in fall 1992, few people went to see it for Kevin Spacey. His Oscar-winning turn in The Usual Suspects was still three years away. Spacey didn’t have the star power of his fellow actors, including Al…

His show included stars, but they were never the point—the charge came from the bits. Illustration by Stanley Chow On May 7th, two weeks before the end of “Late Show with David Letterman,” on CBS, the host delivered one of his final lists, “Top Ten Surprising Facts About Sesame Street.” The entries,…

No one wanted Star Wars when George Lucas started shopping it to studios in the mid-1970s. It was the era of Taxi Driver and Network and Serpico ; Hollywood was hot for authenticity and edgy drama, not popcorn space epics. But that was only part of the problem. As the young director had conceived…

The future is forged by pouring a stiff drink, kicking back, and taking a second to question everything. We here at Esquire.com love a crazy-idea-that-just-might-work, so this week, we're paying tribute to the forward-thinkers of past and present with a series called Esquire Predicts . Because no…

BURLINGTON, Mass. — Dwayne Johnson, better known until recently as the Rock, is a touch-y guy. A hand on the shoulder, a guiding elbow tap — moving across a studio here for his next movie, he used his 6-foot-4 frame as a form of leadership. Not that you’d be likely to miss him otherwise. Mr. Johnson…

At the climax of Avengers: Age of Ultron , the titular supervillain portrayed by 8 million CGI artists and the voice of James Spader launches an attack on a large part of an Eastern European country called Sokovia. 1 Basically, he scissors a border around a big section of a Sokovian city and then…

Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service . For inquiries related to this message please contact support . For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot…

In the 1970s, heroes came alive through vinyl adventures that would later be sampled by hip-hop greats Today’s younger generation will never know a time period in which Captain America, Hulk and Spider-Man weren't big screen icons with accompanying cartoons, action figures, and video games. However…

With a new book and an eternally Rotten outlook, the legendary Sex Pistols / Pil frontman explains his lifetime of provocation By Alan Light J ohn Lydon does not disappoint. Forty years after first teaming up with the Sex Pistols, assuming the name Johnny Rotten, and creating music — and havoc —…

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have…

Chancelor Bennett is posted on the back patio of an Airbnb rental overlooking the Hollywood Hills. He's wearing a White Sox hat; he's smoking a blunt; he's holding court with his friends. He is Chance The Rapper , and Chance The Rapper is a famous rapper, or at least a reasonably famous one. He's…

In the special-edition DVD commentary for 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross , director James Foley talks about a subject that may have largely evaded the audiences mesmerized by the film’s airtight David Mamet dialogue, hyper-efficient plotting, and stunning performances. He talks about desk direction. In…

TWO DISSOLVE WRITERS KEEP THE GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS CONVERSATION GOING… Scott: “Harriet and blah blah Nyborg.” Of the many quotable lines in Glengarry Glen Ross —several suitable for everyday use, like “Coffee is for closers” or “Will. You. Go. To. Lunch.”—that’s always the one that sticks with me the…

TriStar Pictures; Touchstone Pictures When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, most American critics slammed it. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Jeff Vice, in the…

WITHOUT A TRACE Members of the Free Syrian Army in the streets of Damascus, Syria, 2013. Insets: left, reporter Austin Tice in a photo from his Flickr photostream, Syria, 2012; right, photographer Jim Foley in Aleppo, Syria, 2012., Large photograph by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters/Landov; inset, right, by…

With the recent declassification of hundreds of CIA case files, some strange tales of history have come to light. The Daily Beast On Thursday, the CIA declassified hundreds of files from its in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, after a successful Freedom of Information Act request from a…

Gregory Reid Mary Hamm was in pain, though it was hard to tell. She bustled around the Starbucks, pouring drinks, restocking pastries, and greeting customers with an unshakable gaze perfected during 25 years of working in hospitality. Her smile said, How can I help you? Her eyes said, I know you’re…

White House press secretary Josh Earnest, center, stands for a photo with Wall Street Journal journalist Carol Lee, left, and Bloomberg journalist Margaret Talev during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday, April 25, 2015, in Washington. (AP…

Dolph Lundgren met me for lunch at Culina, in the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, although we consumed only coffee. He wore an elegantly tailored pale-gray suit, a pink dress shirt, and a watch whose rotating gold bezel he twisted while mulling his answers. At 57, he remains both physically…