Editor’s note: A few hours after this post was published today, Sony announced it was canceling its Christmas Day release of The Interview. Even by Hollywood’s impressive standards, Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin has a rep as a lousy advertisement for civilization. Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal…

Larry David joins Bill Simmons to discuss Fish in the Dark , the new play he wrote and is performing in, his feelings about the critics of the Seinfeld finale, the chances there will be another season of Curb Your Enthusiasm , and much more. Listen to the podcast on ESPN.com PodCenter here , or on…

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, with a foreword by Marc Benioff Penelope Umbrico/Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles A detail of Penelope Umbrico’s Sunset Portraits from 11,827,282 Flickr Sunsets on 1/7/13 , 2013. For the project, Umbrico…

Ben Wiseman In late May of 2012, a damaged package split open at a FedEx facility in Rancho Cordova, California, spilling dozens of boxed iPhones across the shipping room floor. A worker there contacted Apple, which, with the help of corporate security at Verizon, confirmed what FedEx personnel…

Last year, an Atlantic article introduced us to an activist group run by a former North Korean who now uses balloons to airlift information and technology into into the tightly-controlled country. Now, its members want to use their balloons to tote in copies of The Interview , Sony's beleaguered…

I did not begin 2014 by imagining that the most resonant movie moment of the 12 months to come would be a quiet, resigned stare-down in a bathroom. But it has been that kind of year. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman tells the story of an actor trying to outrun a character that threatens to devour…

Photo: Walt Disney Pixar With our Sound and Visions series, Vulture explores the future of movies and the movie industry. We hope you’ll plug us directly into your cerebral cortex. The speed with which digital cinema took over the world has been nothing short of astonishing. Back in 2007,…

The human brain doesn’t distinguish between binges, whether you’re overdosing on crystal meth, prestige television, or the Emmy-winning combination of both. The initial rush and surrender triggers the same steady flow of dopamine; the eventual crash triggers the same feelings of withdrawal and…

It may seem like a whole lot of smoke for very little fire. Hackers break into the digital catacombs of Sony Pictures Entertainment and make off with terabytes of stolen data including the plot lines of unannounced movies, the nasty internal emails of Hollywood executives, and the temper tantrums…

Some of the greatest shows on television today owe a debt to the serially told forms of the past, such as novels and soap operas. Illustration by Miguel Gallardo One of the happiest moments of my life was the night Dr. Kimberly Shaw tore off her wig. It was December, 1992, and my friends and I had…

Transaction volumes between the ruble and digital currency bitcoin enjoyed their biggest day of the year on Tuesday as the Russian central bank failed to halt the ruble's tumble. The ruble plunged more than 11 percent against the greenback Tuesday — its steepest intraday fall since 1998 — as traders…

Of course, anyone who tells you they know the secret to winning an Oscar is lying because there is no one guaranteed path to the Academy Awards , but as the panelists at yesterday’s “The Race for the Documentary Oscar” session at Sheffield Doc/Fest acknowledged, there are some fast paths to get…

Billed as “the world’s most exciting documentary & digital media festival,” Sheffield Doc/Fest lives up to those unreasonably high expectations. Certainly, with a lineup featuring the latest projects from some of the biggest and best names in documentary filmmaking, lively panels about the future of…

Continuing our voyage of exploration of the Best of 2014 , today we’re taking a look at the smallest of filmic building blocks —the single shot. If you consider the hundreds of thousands of shots that make up the sum total of feature films released in a year, i t’s a daunting task, but one that then…

Paul Porter: How 168 Million Streams Earned Aloe Blacc just $4000 - RapRehab http://t.co/E25VuQ0RMx

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The New York Times: Breaking News: Cuba Frees American Prisoner, U.S. Official Says http://t.co/2AcK5YTomC

The New York Times: Russia’s Central Bank Abruptly Raises Key Rate to 17% http://t.co/2OyUDV98OZ

I was embarrassingly huge on the ClayFighters series as a kid. I drew fan art in class. One day the teacher caught me and I had to deliver a show-and-tell presentation on every image, as I had dedicated entire blank pages to a character’s portraiture. I cherished the June 1997 issue of Nintendo…

It is a very exciting time to be a filmmaker because we have this endless possibility at our fingertips. A person can make pigs fly very cheaply these days…. Being an independent filmmaker was never a great way to make a living, and that hasn’t changed, but the skills that you gain from pursuing…

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Microsoft’s Skype software will start translating voice calls between people today. As part of a preview program, Skype Translator makes it possible for English and Spanish speakers to communicate in their native language, without having to learn a new one. It sounds like magic , but it’s the result…

39 5 I was looking at pictures of land rovers left on the moon (footage and what not). Then I visited this wiki page to see what derelict equipment is on the moon (just sitting around). Which then raises the question: Provided you have time and some understanding of electronics and mechanical…

Photo: HBO, Getty Images With this week's Sound and Visions series, Vulture explores the future of movies and the movie industry. We hope you’ll plug us directly into your cerebral cortex. Movie theaters are faced with a vexing problem: How to ensure that, in the future, they continue to be a place…

Meet the guys building the right’s new machine. The Koch brothers and their allies are pumping tens of millions of dollars into a data company that’s developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national…

Contributor on 12.12.14 in Features @glenn__kenny ‘Most of the crew hadn’t heard ["He Needs Me"] before. And boom, right as I played it over the footage, the crew was like, ‘I fucking get what movie we’re making now, I wish you’d played this earlier.’’ Early in Inherent Vice , the latest film…

…and how Ghostface got it right In 2013 the Wu-Tang Clan announced they would celebrate their 20th anniversary with a new album, A Better Tomorrow. However the year ended without release of a full-length and only with a few half-baked singles seeping out that were panned by fans. To add insult to…

I am late to events about 90 percent of the time. Dinner with friends, appointments, meetings. I hate this about myself. When I was younger and more beholden to their schedules, I loathed my mother for her persistent tardiness, and admired my dad for always being 15 minutes early everywhere (how…

The New Pornographers turned 15 this year, a birthday they celebrated with their glittery sixth album, "Brill Bruisers," and are capping off with tonight's Home for the Holidays' secret show in Vancouver for Google Play Music . Joined by bandmate and niece Kathryn Calder, Newman talks to the…

Getty Images The Sony Pictures hack is like "The Fast and The Furious" series, in that it feels like it might go on forever. The hackers got their hands on a ridiculous amount of data from the Hollywood studio and have been releasing it in waves online, labeling each new release "Gift of the GOP."…

The moms are digging in their purses for marshmallows. Because the kids are getting restless. Because they’ve been stuck in the pews for nearly three hours. Because the adults don’t want to go home. Because the man at the pulpit is singing in a celestial falsetto that seems to know the contours of…

TOKYO — How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations? Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower. A rare built example of…

My friend Patrick has a joke. Maybe you’ve heard it. Patrick was an engineer at Twitter when he wrote this, so I believe him. It’s a great line, not least because it’s probably true . It also illustrates an important principle: most movies (and books, and maybe even companies) that make a big deal…

You've been chilled by the marriage-gone-awry suspense of Gone Girl , stupefied by the cinematic inventiveness of Birdman , and terrified by the twisted mentor-mentee relationship of Foxcatcher , but what about those other must-see films from 2014 that you didn't have time (or an opportunity) to…

The decision to remove Grand Theft Auto 5 from the shelves of Target and K-Mart stores in Australia caused quite the reaction, especially in the American gaming press. The move was discussed, argued over and written about, but the act itself took place in Australia, and reflects Australian culture…

Everyone is altered The secret Hollywood procedure that has fooled us for years Everyone is altered The secret Hollywood procedure that has fooled us for years LOS ANGELES — Hollywood has always carefully guarded its vanity magic tricks. Diet pills, plastic surgery and Botox were Beverly Hills’…

Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo This is a great photo I just ran across on the internets. It said it was “Margaret Hamilton, Apollo program”, but it didn’t say who Margaret Hamilton was. Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer for Project Apollo. It had long been…

The doctrine of " if you don't like it, just don't buy it " is a useful defense for cynical purveyors of shoddy products. They would prefer that you move along and keep your opinions to yourself. When used in video games, this cheap line usefully reduces the relationship between products and humans…

An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting There’s a classic Steve Martin bit from A Wild and Crazy Guy… “I got a great dirty trick you can play on a three-year-old kid… Whenever you’re around him, talk wrong. So now it’s like his first day in school and he raises his hand, ‘May I…