The Order: 1886 has many, many problems, and its relative lack of length is not the most troubling. But the pre-release stories about its supposed length , and what it means for its success, were passed around and fretted over endlessly among the gaming press and social media. The question of game…

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s…

I was only partially raised by my parents. They taught me some things: tying shoelaces, manners, the gentlemen’s sport of cricket. But growing up alongside Sierra adventure games, they taught me pretty much everything else, from asinine grammar to correct police procedure to the very alarming fact…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. Warren Farrell Photograph by Winni Wintermeyer On a balmy afternoon last June, dozens of demonstrators carrying “Stop the Violence” and “Rape is Rape” placards descended on the Hilton DoubleTree in downtown Detroit. They had come to…

Five years ago, I moved in with my partner Dustin, joining him in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment in New York City. He, like me, had lived alone with his things just as he wanted them for some time, and I knew I was, despite being a beloved, invited guest, something of a crisis also. Dustin had lived…

From left: Matt Willey (art director); Stacey Baker (associate photo editor); Kathy Ryan (director of photography); Joanna Milter (deputy photo editor, at computer); Gail Bichler (design director); Jake Silverstein (editor in chief) reviewing cover options for the Feb. 22 Global Issue. David La…

AP / The Atlantic What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata,…

by Alice Bolin “It’s always the husband. Just watch Dateline ,” Gillian Flynn writes in her novel Gone Girl , telling a public who gawked through the OJ Simpson and Scott Peterson trials what they already know. Flynn’s novel, along with David Fincher’s faithful 2014 movie adaptation, is the…

The New York Times: North Koreans work in slavelike conditions abroad, human rights groups say http://t.co/6KbwzkZaQM

The first time Bonnie met her father, Paul Elam, he cried like a baby. It was a summer day in 2005, nearly 25 years after Elam relinquished his parental rights in court and refused to pay child support for Bonnie, whose name has been changed, and her younger brother. Bonnie and Elam felt awkward at…

The real story of how cops responded to the Charlie Hebdo massacre — and what the future holds in a highly charged, and newly armed, France. By Mac McClelland The most interesting thing, to an outsider, about the morning J.R. was having on January 7, 2015, was how fervently he spent it wishing his…

The eight men burst out laughing. They are extras, but not just any extras. They are commercial extras, and for them life is good. "It's almost like stealing," says Green, a squat 63-year-old who looks vaguely like Ernest Borgnine. "You come to set. Half the time you don't do anything. We come in,…

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Race is not their show’s sole concern, and they have a way of switching the familiar “race card” for something more like the whole pack fanned out. Photograph by Graeme Mitchell The wigs on “Key and Peele” are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business.…

Chuck Hodes / FOX From left: Jamal Lyon (Jussie Smollett), Tiana Brown (Serayah), Hakeem Lyon (Bryshere Gray), Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson), Anika Calhoun (Grace Gealey), Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), Andre Lyon (Trai Byers), and Rhonda Lyon (Kaitlin Doubleday) on Fox's Empire Tyler Golden/The…

Shea Serrano: Hello, Steven. Let’s talk about white people saving non-white people — specifically in movies. Not too long ago, I saw the trailer for Black or White , which looks to be about Kevin Costner saving a little black girl. Then, I saw the trailer for McFarland, USA , which looks to be about…

Jack White rocked a sold-out Madison Square Garden over the weekend in support of his sophomore solo album, the Grammy-nominated Lazaretto . Incredibly, White had played The World's Most Famous Arena only once previously, in July 2007, on the White Stripes' Icky Thump tour, their last before…

Seth Rogen, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal, North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, Sony Pictures C.E.O. Michael Lynton, and James Franco. At 8:30 A.M. on November 24, the Monday before Thanksgiving, Amy Pascal arrived in her office in the Thalberg building, on the Sony Pictures lot, in Culver City,…

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, at a conference in Dublin last year. Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile for Web Summit Tim O’Reilly has been at the cutting edge of the Internet since it went commercial. In fact, he helped take it there: In August 1993 he released the Global Network Navigator, a…

Marcella Riley, 29, was having a hard time last summer. After moving to L.A. from New York, the aspiring comedian wasn't making enough money to pay rent, and so was surfing friends' couches. In June, a friend named Conor —whom she'd met years earlier when they worked together at an Apple…

Profiles FEBRUARY 23, 2015 ISSUE The Shape of Things to Come How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product. BY IAN PARKER

MONROEVILLE, Ala. — Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “ Go Set a Watchman ,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “ To Kill a Mockingbird ” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first…

Critics mostly , but fans of the book wouldn’t dare miss ” Fifty Shades of Grey ,” as the big-screen version whipped up a record amount of box-office green during Valentine’s Day weekend. Its three-day gross of $85 million ($94.4 million when President’s Day ticket sales are included) was enough to…

Kent Hernandez / FUSION Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot's control had tweeted, according to the Guardian , "I seriously want to kill people." But the menacing tweet wasn't written by van der Goot; it…

The First Bad Man by Miranda July No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July Me and You and Everyone We Know a film directed by Miranda July The Future a film directed by Miranda July Nick Wall/Eyevine/Redux Miranda July, Cannes, France, 2005 I first met Miranda July years ago at a faraway…

Technology giants often meet their end not with a bang but a whimper, a slow, imperceptible descent into irrelevancy that may not immediately be reflected in the anodyne language of corporate earnings reports. Old kingpins like Digital Equipment and Wang didn’t disappear overnight. They sank slowly,…

The Counselor, Kingdom of Heaven, and Margaret. Photo: 20th Century Fox Last week, discussing Lana and Andy Wachowski’s upcoming Netflix series Sense8 , Ted Sarandos let slip that he had seen a four-hour cut of the directors’ 2012 film Cloud Atlas “that will blow your mind.” Sarandos was naturally…

The relationship between Rachel Cusk and the English press is like a lousy marriage from one of her own barbed, unsentimental novels. When Cusk first blew onto the scene in the early ’90s with the publication of Saving Agnes , she was a photogenic and brilliant Oxford grad who always sounded a bit…

Century-old American companies like General Electric and Ford appear ancient when viewed alongside modern upstarts like Google and Facebook. But there are a number of Japanese firms—some of which have been around for more than a millennium—that exist on another scale of time entirely. Japan is home…

Björk photographed for her 2015 album, Vulnicura. Photograph: Courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin A few years ago, for a feature on a music blog, I asked Björk to make a selection of her favourite records . Her list included Mahler’s 10th Symphony; Alban Berg’s Lulu ; Steve Reich’s…

Our team here at Buffalo 8 Productions and BondIt will be releasing a five part film financing series over the course of the next few months. Stay tuned for articles on packaging (talent and finance), capital structuring (equity, debt, fundraising), producing within a framework (budgetary production…

Last night’s SNL 40th-anniversary special had the unenviable task of cramming decades of comedy history into one evening’s worth of entertainment. Granted, the program in question stretched into an almost four-hour extravaganza, but even that wasn’t enough time to represent all that Saturday Night…

If you think of SNL 40 as a massive dress rehearsal that inadvertently became the live show, the whole night makes more sense. For one of the few times in his life, Lorne Michaels couldn’t cut anything. How do you cut that clumsy “Californians” sketch and tell Taylor Swift and Bradley Cooper,…

My father, Andrew Jefferson Offutt V, grew up in a log cabin in Taylorsville, Ky. The house had 12-inch-thick walls with gun ports to defend against attackers: first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus…

Editor's note: This story was originally published in ESPN The Magazine's Feb. 16 Gambling Issue. ON A MID-SEPTEMBER night, Ezekiel Rubalcada swaggers through the doors of Las Vegas' M Resort Spa Casino. He moves to the half-moon-shaped bar overlooking the sportsbook, catching up with old friends.…

david carr: “How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It: An Explainer” by @rsingel https://t.co/HD1gn96YYT

Grantland: Solo act: The making of Tom Hardy’s man-alone drama, ‘Locke,’ by @misterpatches http://t.co/wNDRk1ni98

A year ago, I created a viral Twitter account. Here‘s what I learned. The first episode of the dystopian U.K. television series Black Mirror is the least notable because the events in its plotline look the most familiar to us now: when a member of the British royal family is kidnapped in what’s…

I n a recent episode of The Mindy Project , Mindy Lahiri, the show’s protagonist played by South Asian American comedian and actress Mindy Kaling, was considering a medical fellowship at Stanford. Her boyfriend, fellow doctor Danny Castellano, upset by the prospect of her moving to California,…

In early 2010, I wrote a column about Vice in which Shane Smith, one of the founders, suggested that he and his band of insurgents were building “the next MTV.” And then there was a promise to become “the next CNN” — outrageous claims at the time, but they are becoming truer every passing day. I…