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

Is it real? ... a family visits a museum in Beijing. Photograph: Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images A museum in China has a problem. It seems to have a few fakes in its vast collection. Well, as many as 40,000. Everything it owns may be nothing more than a mass of crude forgeries . Wei Yingjun, a consultant…

How widespread is art forgery? Experts say it’s wildly rampant. In part three in this series, we ask: Is it time to reconsider the economy of images? Andy Warhol, probably. Pei-Shen Qian was pleased. He would never have to paint Chairman Mao again. The 1970s were not a good time for Qian, or for…

LOS ANGELES It is 6:30 in the morning, and a stubborn mist is hanging low over the Hollywood Hills. This is when TMZ punches in and goes to work making a television show that is beamed out five nights a week to the rest of us, mining our culture’s need to know every single little thing about…

Rex Sorgatz: In this story, I reveal how the New York Times trolled bloggers in 1911. https://t.co/ltUfRyLz3n

joanne mcneil: Your point of view from the GoPro camera to the screen. An essay on screenshots. My latest for @medium’s the Message https://t.co/MAwIqraHe4

Photo: Andy Molloy/ Kennebec Journal/ AP Photo The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized. Not a boot print left behind. It was cold and nearly moonless, a fine night for a…

Jump to Rhianna Pratchett is walking along a burbling stream in the heart of one of London's trendier districts, telling a story and, intermittently, pointing out local birds and other wildlife. The story is a pleasant one — one with a happy ending. It's a story about a girl who grew up in the rural…

The automated writing technology system Quill can run on an ordinary PC, despite its high performance. Photograph: Getty Images A t dawn on 17 March the inhabitants of Los Angeles were woken by a mild tremor. Less than three minutes later the Los Angeles Times website published an initial piece on…

Advertisement Editor’s Picks Volvo to Test Self-Driving Cars in Traffic Google Is Building Its Own Self-Driving Car Prototypes Photo: Google Regulations governing Google’s experimental self-driving cars will come into effect on California’s roads starting 16 September. They have driven more than 1…