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,…

The New York Times: Are European museum passes worth the money? It depends. http://t.co/CL4FTTr73I (Photo: Guia Besana for NYT) http://t.co/GgofJYyPRy

In 1998, a man named John Stacks formed a company, Johnny Resin, that sold model kits to a niche audience. His specialty was a line of sculpts bearing the likenesses of actors from 1966’s Batman television series: Adam West, Burt Ward, and an assortment of villains, all in costume. This was a…

Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses the operating system update during an event at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP As Apple’s mobile operating system matures, each year’s version brings new capabilities and challenges for developers. Last year’s…

Starbucks Days after Apple Pay’s debut at checkout counters across the US, Apple CEO Tim Cook bragged it was already more successful than all other mobile payment services combined. Maybe he meant services offered by companies strictly in the mobile payments business. But it’s hard to believe he…

MASS APPEAL: Premiere: Listen to @DJTrackstar's "RTJ2 Tour Mix" ft. @Ratking & more | http://t.co/a3vp6zzxTQ http://t.co/9NMO7aPCg8

LYING LOW The author, who has kept out of the public eye for a decade, photographed at her Los Angeles apartment. Photograph by Mark Seliger. ‘How does it feel to be America’s premier blow-job queen?” It was early 2001. I was sitting on the stage of New York’s Cooper Union in the middle of taping a…

Adrienne Lindsay: A brief history of ridiculous things we've been asked to believe after famous men were accused of rape. http://t.co/qZkVWInZb2

More proof, if more proof were needed, that there is a crisis in U.S.-Israel relations, and that the crisis goes deeper than simply the dysfunctional personal relationship between Prime Minister Netanyahu's government and the Obama administration (or between their colorful staffs ): A lead editorial…

Sam Adams Mar 7, 2014 9:32 am @samuelaadams Share This Article It’s not exactly news that certain New York theaters are in the business of renting out their screens to filmmakers for the express, even sole, purposes of garnering a review in the New York Times . Not so long ago , this was considered…

Throughout their history at Miramax and now The Weinstein Company, the Weinstein brothers have always found creative ways to handle movies they produce or acquire, but for whatever reason find problematic. They’ve shelved them for years ( The Details , All The Boys Love Mandy Lane , Tears Of A Black…

When Orson Welles made Citizen Kane , he had so many innovative ideas that some of them had to wait for the trailer , which he filled with staged behind-the-scenes footage that framed the cast against film equipment. He narrated it himself, without making an appearance, and while revealing virtually…

From the very first game in the Civilization series through to today, India’s supposedly-peaceful leader Gandhi has been famous for one thing: dropping nukes. And there’s a very good reason for it. This piece originally ran November 3, 2014. It’s not your mind playing tricks on you, or a case of…

If you want to read video game news on Kotaku, or IGN, or hell, even Motherboard, you could go to those publications' websites, peruse the content there, and help pay for the work by passively consuming advertisements. Or, you could go to Archive.today, a site that disgruntled GamerGate members are…

Seth Newburg has a phone. It’s a new phone, just a prototype. Almost no one here at Google has seen it yet. Newburg is sitting in a corner conference room in Google’s Mountain View headquarters, fresh off an airplane, with me at his side, and a photographer standing over his shoulder firing through…

My castle is not your castle … the keep of Loches castle, shown here in a detail from Emmanuel Lansyer’s 1891 painting, was built in the 11th century.Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy 11th century: Castles Most people think of castles as representative of conflict. However, they should be seen…

The New York Times: The rush is on to profit from legal medical marijuana in New York http://t.co/3g9lUVBrK5

How Tarantino’s curated classic changed the way we listen to movies By DJ Pizzo Illustrations by Sean Clauretie The Rebirth Of Cool Midway through Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction , I had already fallen in love with it. As I sat in the theatre 20 years ago, at 17 years of age, my tastes in movies…

el-p: http://t.co/FEiocjKgB1

There is an enduring story about the Academy Awards Best Picture race that goes like this: The best picture never wins. Every year, Oscar voters have enough temerity/foresight/integrity/discernment to nominate at least one movie on which the verdict of history would smile favorably if it were to…

The New York Times: America's chief technology officer doesn't let Washington's BlackBerries and big laptops get in her way http://t.co/S9Y79TRrbm

The first time a Sim died on me, my surviving Sims circled the body and cried their eyes out. Personally, I didn’t feel the need to mourn. I was far too fascinated by the fact that the Grim Reaper had turned up to take the Sim away. This piece originally appeared on October 30, 2014. The Sims is a…

Virgin Galactic's spaceship crashed yesterday , and at least one person is dead. That's a horrible thing. So what now? The company has roughly 1,000 customers waiting to go into space, and while this will surely spook some of them, the dream of commercial space tourism will go forward. But this is…

Watermark portrait by Tim Tomkinson Years of running drugs and boosting cars left Frank Bourassa thinking: There’s got to be an easier way to earn a dishonest living. That’s when he nerved up the idea to make his fortune. (Literally.) Which is how Frank became the most prolific counterfeiter in…

“A good horror movie is in many ways like a good joke: Revisit the punch line too many times, and it wears out.” —Stephen King, “What’s Scary” Poltergeist is a terrifying movie. Up until the final act, when protective patriarch Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) starts screaming about Indian burial…

It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when you could not play any song ever recorded, instantly, from your phone. I call this period adolescence. It lasted approximately 30 years, and it was galvanized by conflict. At that time, music had to be melted onto plastic discs and shipped…

Neo Scavenger is one of the best turn-based RPGs I’ve ever played. Although still in Early Access, it has oodles of content and has received several hefty updates since I first played it . As part of Survival Week, I decided to document a single playthrough of the game. No quicksaves, no restarts,…

Games with permadeath — wherein you start over completely when you die — provide certain stakes to a gaming session. Rather than reloading your last save after you die, you lose all your gear, you lose all your progress, and you essentially lose all the time you’ve spent playing up to that point.…

The following NBA Half-Baked Ideas are ordered from most plausible to most “C’mon, Wildes.” Warning: These ideas are not fully baked. Old friends are like cacti. They’ve grown prickly and don’t need much attention. Your relationship with your cactus friends can survive on a diet of monthly texts,…