Getty I was sitting in the New York loft in November 2007 where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced Beacon to a roomful of skeptical advertising execs. Like many things Zuckerberg has tried over the years, this advertising product didn’t work, with countless people complaining it crossed the…

It’s impossible to review Lena Dunham’s book without reviewing Lena Dunham. Or at least, “Lena Dunham”, the strange, confected, caricatured, endlessly examined carapace inside which, presumably, the real woman resides. Dunham’s first appearance in print came in 1998, when a Vogue story on New York…

Halfway through a long lunch at Tavern on the Green on a sunny September day, the trim, tanned filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, dressed in a Southern California beach bum’s uniform — Quiksilver shorts, faded blue T-shirt, crumpled white bucket hat — went silent. Mr. Anderson, 44, had been asked a…

Although he made one movie about mad love— The Curious Case of Benjamin Button— David Fincher never seemed a director deeply concerned with intimate relationships between women and men. His primary subject has been masculinity as a struggle within the male psyche ( Fight Club , The Social Network )…

“Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.” – Bromberg, 1993, p. 166 The above quote is not from The Swapper —Facepalm Games’ existential space puzzler recently ported to the PS4—but it could have…

Watching Hancock at a pre-release critics’ screening, I was convinced it would be either one of the all-time biggest flops, or a cult film that would be picked over and obsessed about for decades to come. Hancock did what big studio films almost never do: It surprised me. I was impressed by its…

The Google masterplan?Photograph: Guardian I f you want to understand the future of humanity – where we’re headed, who’ll be in charge, and exactly how worried you should be about that – you could do worse than begin with two unremarkable buildings, on opposite coasts of the US. The more famous one,…

Early in Brazil , the madcap dystopian nightmare by which all of Terry Gilliam’s other films are measured, a bureaucratic drone named Mr. Helpmann scoffs at a recent wave of terrorist bombings: “If these people would just play the game, they’d get a lot more out of life.” The Zero Theorem —…

The globetrotting chef, author, and TV host estimates that he's been away from home "about 250 days a year, for nearly the past decade," which makes him, among other things, one of the world's foremost experts in surviving the constant indignities of travel. Here, Bourdain proffers some wisdom on…

The indicator tubes indicated the atmosphere on the station was normal, so the crew equalized the pressure between the compartments in a similar manner to what they had done before with the outside hatch of the airlock. Mission control advised them to put on their gas masks, just in case, and open…

Movie: Prisoners Director: Denis Villeneuve Writer: Aaron Guzikowski Release date: September 20, 2013 U.S. box office: $61 million (58th best of 2013) Worldwide box office: $122.1 million (61st best of 2013) Days in U.S. theatrical release: 77 days Rotten Tomatoes rating: 82 Metacritic score: 74…

"Pud" Galvin, a 19th-century baseball player famed for his pitching prowess. Library of Congress In 1889, a Pittsburgh pitcher named Jim "Pud" Galvin became the first baseball player to be widely known for using a performance enhancer. (He was nicknamed "Pud" because his pitching supposedly turned…

Devolver Digital: Seeing your fans as more than customers... via @Gamasutra http://t.co/0e2rMc7P7R

Grantland: Small(er) Movie Roundup: ’Tis the season for dystopia, by @Wesley_Morris http://t.co/t8IPhqsaHM

Modern Meadow , a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, is aiming to commercialize leather and meat products that are not made from slaughtered animals but brewed in cell-culture vats. If it works, and if the market embraces the resulting products, it would lead to vast savings in water, land, and…

ONE of the most notable demographic trends of the last two decades has been the delayed entry of young people into adulthood. According to a large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s, it has taken longer for each successive generation to finish school, establish financial…

“Phil Hartman was perhaps the best cast member, ever, of Saturday Night Live .” Phil Hartman as himself (middle) by Fred Prouser/Reuters. Collage of SNL stills courtesy of Saturday Night Live and NBC. This weekend, Saturday Night Live kicks off its 40 th season. To mark the occasion we asked writers…

Grantland: Good-bye, Mr. November: Taking Stock of Derek Jeter's Divisive Legacy, by @jonahkeri http://t.co/ZsS74eW2ye

There are few more powerful combinations than when just the right song meets just the right scene. To put all our favorites in one place, The Dissolve compiled 50 remarkable combinations of pop music (broadly defined) and moviemaking. Not Fade Away “Roadrunner” by Sex Pistols David Chase is…

There are few more powerful combinations than when just the right song meets just the right scene. To put all our favorites in one place, The Dissolve compiled 50 remarkable combinations of pop music (broadly defined) and moviemaking. Not Fade Away “Roadrunner” by Sex Pistols David Chase is…

Spammers are sending out mysterious messages filled with quotes from classic literature. For some time, spammers have culled repositories of written English to provide filter-confusing "word-salads" in their messages; I've even gotten spams containing passages lifted from my own online writing. The…

Clive Thompson: Was this letter handwritten by a human -- or a robot? My piece on how to tell the difference: https://t.co/ERb6Yfu71S http://t.co/4Yo4Ft4CjL

BBC News (World): How did India get to #Mars on a shoestring budget? http://t.co/plXaTkVSdd #BBCGoFigure http://t.co/OJCF6fqEYH

Songs we couldn’t find and didn’t witness Photography by Nathan Dainty So, we have come to a close of the list of Arcade Fire songs we have license to discuss and rank. In the interest of being comprehensive, below is a list of tracks that Arcade Fire have covered at some point in their career that…

Photo: Robyn Von Swank For almost 20 years now, Sarah Silverman has been a shining blue beacon of amusing yet slightly alarming remarks about race, sex, politics, and weed. And while she’s always acted, recently she’s picked up steam in Hollywood, appearing in films like Take This Waltz , Wreck-It…

“At some point you will say to yourself or someone THIS LOOKS AMAZING IN BLACK AND WHITE,” Steven Soderbergh wrote about a movie yesterday. He was referring to — wait for it — Raiders of the Lost Ark . Dr. Soderbergh had performed a new experiment at his lab over at Extension 765. First — after…

Irvine Welsh: 'The Scots have shown the western world that the corporate-led, neo-liberal model for the development of this planet has a limited appeal.' Photograph: Martin Alan Smith/PacificPress/Barcroft India T hey came out in their droves, in a last-ditch, stoic defence of the union, to staunch…

I came across my first trickjump compilation around 2007. Although many first-person shooters have their own devoted communities of trickjumping, the compilation I first saw was for Quake 3 —a game that I had played many times with roommates and friends at LAN parties we used to host in Chicago. The…

S hock Top is a beer made by the massive, multinational brewing company AB-InBev. People who drink craft beer know that Shock Top is a beer made by AB-InBev and its local consortium Labatt, and those same people who know that Shock Top is a Labatt product often speculate that the line between Shock…

Diane Hohen, with TaskRabbit, delivers a bouquet of flowers in Boston on March 29, 2012. TaskRabbit is a task and errand service that allows people to hire others to do small jobs. Photo: Essdras M Suarez/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Earlier this year, I hired a house cleaner. I wouldn’t have…

Since filing an amicus brief with the EFF on the first case in the country challenging the constitutionality of "Stingray" surveillance in 2012, the ACLU has used press reporting and analysis of government records to establish that 43 different state and local law enforcement agencies in 18 states…

I n the heart of Kabul’s heavily guarded diplomatic district, down a quiet side street, sits a dilapidated two-story building fronted by a beige boundary wall topped with razor wire. Its front entrance is a gaping hole blocked with corrugated iron, and its windows, missing their glass, have faint…

Henry McCollum is released. (Photo by Jenny Warburg.) Watching an innocent client walk out of prison is every defense lawyer’s dream, especially for those of us who represent people condemned to die. This week, I got to watch my client, Henry McCollum, North Carolina’s longest serving death row…

Peter Baker: Obama "haunted" by failed raid to rescue Foley/Sotloff; irritated by talk of "wan, diffident, professorial president" http://t.co/q37BkYmB6F

Rex Sorgatz: That history class that Bill Gates wants taught? It's basically Minecraft — no seriously, it's world building. http://t.co/UZHt1fc3Yu

Woo-hoo! You just discovered a Vermeer in your aunt’s basement. But who will verify if it is real? In part four of this series, we find a surprising answer: maybe no one. A few years ago, an intriguing television series, Fake or Fortune? , popped up on the BBC. The conceit was as simple as a…

Kate Lee: New in The Message: an excerpt of an original piece of alternate-history fiction by @doctorow https://t.co/1Pnjh22gA1