I t was pretty cold for a Saturday in late May. It was about 50 degrees out, and everyone was wearing three layers. People had on their Cubs jackets, their Illinois jackets, their Northwestern jackets. A guy in front of me was wearing one of those psychoanalyst sweaters with the buttons and high…

A Ugandan film company that makes low-budget action movies in the slums has found a cult following online - one US fan liked their films so much, he abandoned New York to become an action movie star in Kampala. It was December 2011 and things were not going well for Alan Hofmanis. "My girl dumped me…

It’s a dark reality of the digital age: Every year, security breaches, privacy hacks, and other forms of cyber warfare get more frequent, more invasive, and leave more destruction in their wake. Last year, the Sony Pictures hackers didn’t just expose executive and employee emails, medical records,…

Ava DuVernay, director of the film “Selma,” poses for a portrait at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. Black female filmmakers are one of Hollywood’s greatest rarities. Given the statistics, DuVernay defies incredible odds with the film’s Oscar bid for best picture. (Photo by Chris…

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh accepts the Lennon-Ono Grant for Peace at the Second Biennial Awards at the United Nations on Oct. 7, 2004, in New York. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images In a blockbuster 10,000-word story for the London Review of Books…

This article is part of Film Week, Kill Screen’s week-long meditation on the intersection between film and videogames. Check out the other articles here . And, if you’re in NYC, grab tickets to our Film Fest at Two5Six on Friday, May 15th. //// A favorite videogame level is like a close lover. Every…

T here is something zen about scrolling through photos of thousands of penises, all standing at attention, rows and rows of thumbnails of erections of all colors, each captured for the camera in varying states of throb. The downside to that calm, however, is getting caught absentmindedly browsing…

In some small part, I owe my career to Bill Simmons. Not in the sense that many professional sportswriters will tell you – that Simmons pioneered a style of writing for peers and fans that no one had seen before, which seems like an odd assertion if you went to college in the 1980s or 1990s and read…

Ben Lawsky, New York's superintendent of financial services, trumpeted the news with a tweet. "Big day. New York issues first charter to a virtual currency company," the tweet read, just above an image of the charter, complete with Lawsky's signature and an official New York seal. Lawsky and New…

David Letterman thanks the people of Schoharie, New York, who made up the entire audience during a 2002 Late Show taping. Logo by Slate . Photo by John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images. Attending the taping of a late-night TV show is not a comfortable experience. First, you’ll stand in line on a city…

Two Dissolve writers keep the Walk Hard conversation going... Genevieve: We’ve covered spoof films a couple times before for Movie Of The Week—both an established classic, Airplane! , and a nascent cult favorite, MacGruber — and both times, it’s been difficult to not turn these discussions into just…

So last week, ESPN canned Bill Simmons . And now everyone’s doing the fun thing where we speculate about where he will end up for the next phase of his career. Where’s ol’ Bill gonna go? Fox? Turner/Bleacher Report? NBC? A boutique startup underwritten by a messianic venture capitalist with a boner…

Jack Black Illustration by Tom Bachtell Jack Black’s first acting job, at thirteen, was an Atari commercial. He wore a safari hat and bugged his eyes as he talked up a jungle-crossing video game called Pitfall. Last week, he sat at Barcade, a Manhattan pub stocked with more than four dozen vintage…

Collaboration and authenticity aren’t mutually exclusive Imagine two different scenarios: Scenario #1: Kanye West spends a year secluded in a tony Hawaii-based recording studio, alone with nothing but his thoughts and a blank document open on his iPad. He is stuck on one particular line in an…

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I remember the first time I went shoplifting. The sun was shining, Marin was singing, and I needed a shovel. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, on May 11, 2015 and on Kotaku on November 26, 2015. Two hundred Rupees was well outside my price range, but as I slipped into the village store I…

LAST week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey put off , yet again, deciding between two proposals for a nearly $4 billion project to rehabilitate the dilapidated Central Terminal Building at La Guardia Airport . Disdain about the disrepair, crowds and grubbiness at La Guardia is so…

His persistent path to success included hip-hop, retro soul, country house and 1,000 other ideas In 2006 I was running HipHopSite.com , which made its money by acting as a mail order record store for DJs and fans of underground hip-hop. We built our audience by delivering daily free content,…

Elisabeth Shue and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas . By Suzanne Hanover/MPTVImages.com. As with so many impressionable boomers who received their cultural education at drive-ins and double features, it was the movies that first impressed Las Vegas on my bubblegum brain. Not Ocean’s 11, the Rat…

Roadside Attractions Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin in Maggie . Forty-five years into his acting career, Arnold Schwarzenegger is showing us a new side of himself with Maggie , his new indie film opening in limited release on May 8. The action icon and former politician makes a go at…

The Russian president stunned Obama when he proposed Steven Seagal as an intermediary between Washington and Moscow. BuzzFeed News' Max Seddon and Rosie Gray tell the extraordinary story of the faded action star's dalliances with the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin knew his relationship with the United…

Joe Zhou: The Cuban Money Crisis http://t.co/r51Lzzr9T8

It has been 22 years since the last good Jurassic Park movie, 24 years since the last good Terminator movie, 34 years since the last good Mad Max movie, and never ever ever ever since the last good Fantastic Four movie. It has been either 32 years or 35 years since the last good Star Wars movie,…

Nothing is more frustrating than being a Wu-Tang fan. The ones who’ve been around around since the group’s early years know that the nine members have had their fair share of ups and downs over the past two decades. Last week, I sat down with Raekwon the Chef for a candid chat about his new LP Fly…

One of those studies, commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles, found that women and men who graduate from Sundance's prestigious labs in Utah finish their films at the same rate and get their films accepted to the world's top independent festivals at the same rate. Then…

By Bill Keller David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “ Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets ” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote (1997), which Simon adapted into an…

Sarah Silverman in Los Angeles, October 11th. Photograph by Martin Schoeller / Corbis The comedian Sarah Silverman exerts a kind of mesmeric control over an audience. She doesn’t laugh at her own jokes, and when she smiles it is deliberately inappropriate. The expression that lingers on her face is…

In his 1995 book In the Blink Of An Eye , film editor Walter Murch recalls a conversation with a friend of his wife. He asks what Murch does for a living, and when Murch tells him that he edits movies, the friend replies, “Oh, editing. That’s where you cut out the bad bits.” That’s a succinct…

What if a stalker had an army? Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend was obsessed with destroying her reputation—and thousands of online strangers were eager to help. By · 4/28/2015, 5:45 a.m. Print Zoe Quinn. (Photograph by Jason Grow) The first thing Eron Gjoni said after sitting down across from me at Veggie…

Letterman Prepares to Sign Off Damon Winter/The New York Times In a single bound, David Letterman seemed to leap the full length of the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, racing from backstage as if he’d been thrust forward by the fanfare played by his longtime bandleader, Paul Shaffer, and his CBS…

As of Tuesday morning, exactly three days have passed since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook Nepal, killing thousands and leaving millions in need of help. In disaster response, the end of the first 72 hours is often considered an inflection point: the unofficial moment when the most acute phase…

ATLANTIC CITY – Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the fourth boardwalk casino here to close this year, was pronounced dead at 5:59 a.m. on a Tuesday, which in and of itself seemed an insult. In the end, the 30-year-old onetime hotbed of glamor looked like it had smoked too much, had drunk too hard and…

Jim Bourg / Reuters Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore—an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain. Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city's publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor…

T he Hulk is sitting in a half-full subway car on a Monday afternoon, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, not taking up too much space, definitely not smashing anything. Just another New Yorker — nothing to see here. He’s riding the 1 train up to Central Park in search of an early spring, and his fellow…

These days the entertainment landscape has shifted to all-digital all-the-time, and it can leave a person thirsty for a real world waste of time. Pinball is one great solution to getting yourself out into meatspace and it’s seen a resurgence of popularity in the last few years. Players find each…

"I had the idea that we should contact the Chia Pet company and talk them into making a 'Dave Chia,'" Photo: Gluekit The Lost Laughs of Letterman The departing host and his former writers share the greatest jokes he never told. Illustration by Gluekit My first day at Late Night With David Letterman,…

Paul : I’d like to talk about Cards Against Humanity , one of our hobby’s biggest breakout successes. The best way to describe Cards Against Humanity is “Lego for jokes”. It gives its players setups and punchlines, all ready to click together in one-step assembly. It’s easier than microwaving food…

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine story about the failure of the ZPM espresso maker Kickstarter reminds me to say: Kickstarter is a tool for managing risk . Kickstarter specializes in creative projects, but creative projects are inherently risky. They are risky in an artistic sense: creativity…

With Moore’s permission, below you can find his keynote in its entirety: 1. My number one guiding principle in making documentary films is essentially the “Fight Club” Rule. What is the first rule of “Fight Club”? The first rule of “Fight Club” is: “Don’t talk about ‘Fight Club.'” The first rule of…