From the curators: The AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova) was designed by Soviet military engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov and debuted in 1947. Building on previous assault rifle technologies, he developed it to be lightweight, easy to handle, durable, and cheap to produce. The AK-47 became standard issue for…

FULL DISCLOSURE: I never worked directly for Chris Boyce at the CBC, but during my 2nd stint he was my boss’ boss. Background Last Tuesday at the CBC’s Toronto headquarters, senior executives Chris Boyce and Chuck Thompson paid the beleaguered Q staff an unexpected visit. Boyce, who runs CBC Radio,…

The odds aren’t bad that you are (or soon will be) one of the more than 40 million people who’ve viewed the 2013 music video for “Bad Motherfucker,” a song by Russian band Biting Elbows. If so, you were probably too transfixed by the film’s first-person footage and convincing violence to pay…

Imagine attempting to write a nuanced, emotionally rich story about a protagonist who kills, like, several hundred people over the course of his or her hero’s journey. That gives you an idea of how hard it is to write for the first-person shooter genre of video games. Effective storytelling requires…

Boob Tube: UHF (1989) Posted by R. Emmet Sweeney on November 11, 2014 UHF was released to apoplectic critics and an apathetic public on July 21st, 1989. Its opening weekend box office put it in eleventh place, behind the nearly month-old run of Weekend at Bernie’s . It would disappear from theaters…

You know John Thorn. Official historian for Major League Baseball. Mustachioed guy in the Ken Burns documentary. I went to his big house upstate last week because Thorn wanted to show me something. It was evidence of a “lively corpse,” Thorn called it, “or fabulous invalid.” Let me explain. As you…

The box office failures of Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005) gave studios an excuse for not making superhero movies featuring anyone but white men. But it seemed like more of a convenient justification than a good one, since the failure of both The Green Hornet and Green Lantern in 2011 didn’t lead…

How a viral rap song with no chorus topped the Billboard charts and made everyone Shmoney Dance T he top ten on Billboard ’s Hot 100 Chart is a lot like the student body of an elite prep school. It’s dominated by the kids with heritage, their status is preordained, their popularity genetically…

This weekend, an animated lyric video for Nicki Minaj’s new single “Only” did the improbable: it eclipsed Nicki’s lyrics themselves — and this on a song in which Nicki, Drake, and Lil Wayne talk repeatedly and at length about how, why, and when they may engage in sexual intercourse! Lyric videos are…

“Weird Al” Yankovic is a parodist, not a satirist. When he turns Michael Jackson’s “Bad” into “Fat,” or Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” into “Handy,” he isn’t critiquing or exposing anything about those songs. He’s taking something popular and making it sillier—the way lots of people do, when they’re kidding…

Sharp stencil: Rocket Launcher by Banksy. Photo: Steve Lazarides B anksy is due any minute. The only trouble is I don't know what he looks like. Nobody here seems to know what he looks like. But they all know him. That is, they know of him. That is, if he is a he. The barman in the pub in…

Andrew Winning/Reuters Kriston Capps Nov 4, 2014 The world's foremost street artist is a social justice warrior and a viral media master. She could be anyone. Banksy Does New York , a new documentary airing on HBO on Nov. 17, opens on a bunch of scofflaws trying to jack an inflatable word balloon…

While reporting my recent Rolling Stone feature on Bill Murray, I spent a weekend in Toronto, attending the world premiere of St. Vincent, going to a screening of Ghostbusters at the official “ Bill Murray Day,” talking to his friends and collaborators, partying with the star at a Toronto nightclub,…

Deep breaths. That's usually what it takes to stay sane while watching somebody search for their neck pillow while standing in the aisle with 100 other passenger waiting to get to their seats. Loading an airplane quickly and efficiently isn’t an easy task. It should be, and could be, but the humans…

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Video: Vicky Wasik] If you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of the cast iron . When I packed up my apartment last spring and had to live for a full month with only two pans in my kitchen, you can bet your butt that the first one I grabbed was my trusty cast iron…

The extent to which virtual reality technology is going to change the way we consume entertainment hasn’t yet been determined. But as the hardware that it takes to make these things starts getting cheaper and more common, we’re going to get our first glimpse at the answers. Even while Oculus Rift…

Self-help with the "Wolf of Wall Street" It’s 6:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I’m nearly an hour into a sales pitch called “The Truth Behind His Success.” A couple hundred other people sit in stiff plastic chairs in the Los Angeles Convention Center, seeking transformation. "My dad f—ing hated…

Game Info Platform 360, PS3, Win, PS4, Xbox One Publisher Activision Developer Sledgehammer Games Release Date Nov 4, 2014 Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare developer Sledgehammer Games has the unappealing responsibility of cleaning up someone else's mess. Last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts was a low…

As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture , they’ve faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn’t the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a…

Courtesy Aloe Blacc I am many things: a singer, a musician, a businessman, and a philanthropist. But above all, I am a songwriter. At our core, songwriters are creators . We challenge ourselves and others to reflect on the world around us. And the work we produce has power—power to capture people’s…

Alexis Madrigal I want to show you something. First, below, you'll see real seventh grade math homework, which I acquired from my father, who works at my old middle school. You probably recognize this sort of sheet from before "math" became algebra, geometry, and the calculus. And then, the video…

IT’S GOING TO BE A BUMPY RIDE Travis Kalanick, C.E.O. and co-founder of Uber, in San Francisco. Every now and then, when he’s spoiling for a fight, Travis Kalanick has a face like a fist. At these times, his eyes crinkle, his nose flares, and his mouth purses just like a clenched hand readying a…

Hola chicas y chicos! I'm writing this from the gorgeous flat in the 19ieme arrondissement where Mom and I are staying for a few days. It's a far cry from my student chambre, - the bathroom has proper lighting for one thing, and I have yet to notice any ants in the kitchen. You might wonder why the…

In a New York Times review of The Incredibles, A.O. Scott made a curious observation: “[the film] suggests a thorough, feverish immersion in both the history of American comic books and the philosophy of Ayn Rand.” He wasn’t alone in this belief. When The Incredibles came out 10 years ago, it…

Sal DiVita, the lead artist and game designer at video game maker Midway, was suplexing his co-worker. A big pro wrestling fan, he was having a bit of fun in the motion capture room after miming tackles for the animations of the company's upcoming video game, NFL Blitz . He'd mix in elbow drops, leg…

Despite the current centrality of comic-book movies in American culture, I’m not much of a comic-book reader. For me, they’re still just funny-animal stories for children, and until I read an article proclaiming that comic books aren’t just for kids anymore, I can only assume they appeal exclusively…

Snopes.com creator David Mikkelson has been calling out bullshit on the Internet for two decades. (There's no antifreeze in Fireball , people ... merely the makings of a very regrettable hangover.) We caught up with Mikkelson to find out where Snopes came from, and what's next for the site. Above,…

Boxed E.T. Game on Ebay My friend, colleague, and fellow Punk Archaeologist Prof. Bill Caraher introduced me to what he calls the “archaeology of late capitalism”, and he wrote yesterday (Nov. 3, 2014 for those of you in the future) on his blog about Alamogordo’s Ebay auctions of Atari games…

Tucked away on the official Church of Satan website is a list of recommended films , offered up without much context or explanation. Naturally, we had to find out more, so we reached out to Magus Peter H. Gilmore, the Church of Satan's High Priest. He gave us an amazing lesson on what Satanists look…

Every year, the University of Notre Dame's Global Adaptation Index issues a listing of which nations are best prepared to combat climate change—and which are most primed to suffer under the swelter. ND-GAIN examines national resilience, essentially, to employ the buzz word of the day. It "ranks more…

Photograph by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic via Getty The comedian Tig Notaro appeared on “Transparent” and hosts a (http://professorblastoff.com/), but she is best known for a standup set she performed two years ago, a few days after learning that she had breast cancer.* She later got a double…

The founder of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad talks beat machines, the early days of hip-hop, and the next steps in music production “Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, man, and neither does music happen sequentially. It all morphs…styles, and cultures shift each other.” The words from Hank Shocklee…

Electronica pioneer Brian Transeau made a record the way his heroes did—without a computer in sight For Brian Transeau, computers are the ultimate musical instrument. The veteran electronic artist, active since 1993, is known for groundbreaking production techniques such as the stutter edit and…

From Sly Stone to DJ Premier—how synthetic rhythm transformed music A revolution in music production ignited when machines began to produce viable sounds. Initially primitive and strange, only early adopters understood how rhythm and beat machines could change the musical landscape. Now we recognize…

Snazzy, beloved noir adventure game Grim Fandango is getting resurrected : better graphics, new controls, new music—the works. Not so long ago, however, the game was seemingly lost to time, and Double Fine had to go on a journey involving chains of people, stolen hard drives, and lost code to save…

James Brown, Jay Z and the complex influence of black music on national politics Election Day brings to mind two artists who have endorsed candidates in the past. One of them had a tremendous impact on the 20th Century, the other on the 21st. The first one helped to lay the groundwork for the…

There’s nothing impersonal about a little drone that attaches to your wrist then releases, flying, following you whenever you like. It’s like having a personal assistant whose one purpose is watching everything you do. And streaming it. Capturing it for the whole world to see, followed by a return…

Mixtape master: Kurt Cobain.Photograph: Raffaella Cavalieri/Redferns “I think he just did it because he was bored. He started doing it, and just kept going. It was a project. These are the words of Tracy Marander, Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend when the Nirvana frontman made his newly infamous mixtape,…