The 1974 film Chosen Survivors opens by introducing a nutty premise that just gets nuttier as it goes along. In the first scene, a handful of heavily sedated strangers disembark from a helicopter, wearing confused expressions. They’re placed in an elevator for a lengthy descent. At the bottom, they…

Creating ‘Whatever’ Matthew Staver for The New York Times CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Workers have been busy in this bucolic, out-of-the-way ski town: The streets have been painted blue, as have the light poles. Blue props and fencing have been hauled in, rendering the place almost unrecognizable. And as…

Sometimes, you get to a point at work where your motivation is completely depleted. But circumstances dictate that you can't quit. So how do you keep going? There's always a way. Much like most people, I've faced multiple instances where there was nothing keeping me at a job, but bills and…

Zajac/Flickr At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M. “We can’t sell that…

The view out my apartment window, looking down over Ground Zero, in November 2006. Thirteen years after 9/11, the World Trade Center is undergoing a massive transformation. What has life been like above the site? Given the option, I would not have chosen to live above The Hole. For a long time, that…

david carr: We’re All Nerds Now http://t.co/w6rYBOsJCq @noamcohen on triumph of geekery.

david carr: >@fmanjoo makes the smart case that the phones a company makes are a window into their souls. http://t.co/vQy4ZDCkcF

Down in Front! on 29 October, 2013 at 12:00 [This post is part of the 500 Words feature. Check the archive here , or submit your own to whatis[at]thedangersound[dot]com. ] Effective immediately, I am not taking another picture at a concert. I sincerely hope I can hold true to this statement because…

This morning's confirmation of a massive deal for Microsoft to buy Minecraft-creator Mojang for $2.5 billion was only half of the story. The other half is what the game's creator Markus "Notch" Persson plans to do now that he's leaving the game he made and the studio he founded. In a nutshell: Keep…

Joe Sample is a traditionalist. Born and raised in the segregation-era Fifth Ward section of Houston, Texas, he quickly developed a taste for the rich musical heritage of his homeland—the parts of the South they used to call “The Territory,” where boundaries between different genres of African…

The biggest gaming news of the day wasn't the $2.5 billion purchase by Microsoft of the studio behind massive-hit Minecraft , it was why the game's creator chose to sell and not stick around after he did. And Markus Persson, known to his fans simply as Notch, isn't just leaving his studio Mojang and…

Cuepoint: Raise Your Smartphone To The Sky? How selfish people are ruining the live concert experience. https://t.co/mGWUqS31R3 http://t.co/7W5U6kqKdV

The drummer and co-founder of The Roots has had an incredible journey from West Philadelphia to "The Tonight Show." CBS News The bandleader known as Questlove has been shaking up the music world for years with recordings and concert tours. Now he's on late night TV. With Anthony Mason, we Take Note:…

Kanye West, Chris Brown, deadmau5: When Great Music Is Made By Despicable People Kanye West is such a dick . And he knows it. Back in 2010, on his hit single “Runaway,” the Chicago-bred rapper famously toasted to the douchebags, scumbags and assholes ► — to himself, basically — in an effort to…

Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers / Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed Counter-clockwise from top: Johnny Whitworth (A.J.), Robin Tunney (Deb), Liv Tyler (Corey), Anthony LaPaglia (Joe), Rory Cochrane (Lucas), Coyote Shivers (Berko), Debi Mazar (Jane), Ethan Embry (Mark), Maxwell Caulfield (Rex…

Style/Storytelling Tasha: Hedwig And The Angry Inch is mighty damned efficient: Broadway musicals routinely stretch past three hours with intermission, but Hedwig manages, in a lean 95 minutes, to convey a complicated personal past, a distressing present, and a promising future, largely by eliding a…

M y ex-husband was the most romantic person I’ve ever met. He also hit me on the day we got married, while I was wearing my wedding dress. That’s why when I saw the footage of ex-Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice punching his then-fiancée Janay Palmer , I wasn’t surprised that she was now his wife.…

There was no reason not to look at the tape. That's really all you need to come to the conclusion that the NFL is completely full of shit when it comes to the entire Ray Rice affair. You already know that the league and the Ravens have publicly denied seeing the tape of Rice knocking his wife out…

The Packers running back Eddie Lacy is tackled by Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor, September 4, 2014. Photograph by Otto Greule Jr/Getty With characteristic restraint and understatement , the N.F.L. season began last night, in Seattle, where the Seahawks started their Super Bowl title defense by…

A DJ’s vinyl is smashed at Suge Knight’s Vegas nightclub Las Vegas, March 16, 1996 The dance floor was filling up at Suge Knight’s Club 662, a semi-legal, stand-alone nightclub on Flamingo Road. A local DJ named Warren Peace was manning the turntables, finally getting the party started. The fight…

The Sims 4 is a big game. But like any so-called life simulator, it only seems that way when you add up its countless tiny bits and pieces into one giant mosaic. Actually playing the game feels like you're both telling and watching a series of private, intimate stories. Let me start with one of…

PATHETIC Photo I TOOK IN GEZI PARK TRYING TO DOCUMENT TEAR GAS WITH A PHONE TOO BIG FOR MY HANDS My female hands meant I couldn’t use my Google Nexus to document tear gas misuse The above photo is one of the many —pathetic— photos I took while struggling to document misuse of tear gas with a phone…

Photo by Derick Daily DJ Shadow (real name Josh Davis) talks about records like a veteran surgeon talks about anatomy. With precision and finesse, he dissects the bones of the album piece by piece to paint a full picture of the lush soundscape he hears. In 2013, Shadow and Cut Chemist (real name…

By Ron Hart Contributor on 09.10.14 in News At the beginning of the month Run the Jewels — the duo of El-P and Killer Mike — announced that their second record would be released October 28th on Nas’s Mass Appeal imprint. The 11-track LP reportedly has a darker tone than its predecessor, and features…

The 20th anniversary of the home release of Mortal Kombat II arrives this week. As such, we are going to rank all 12 of the game’s characters. But first, a short story: The first time I played Mortal Kombat II was at an arcade called Robotar in a small mall in an unimpressive part of San Antonio,…

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper was absolutely gushing yesterday when he announced the discovery of one of the lost ships from the doomed Franklin expedition. But this anti-science government doesn't actually care for archaeology. Rather, it plans to use the find as a way to make a…

Games and art. Art and games. Do you feel your eyes rolling involuntarily to the back of your head? In the insider world of designers, critics and gamers we have long grown weary of this particular debate. But outside our closed circles, people still find it a surprisingly intriguing question. It's…

Carver sits on an organic bamboo bench outside the tea atelier. A chalkboard sign advertises a grassy green-black blend from the Zhejiang Province. He was certain the store was a front, but an investigation earlier that morning turned up nothing but a newfound love for white oolong, harvested by…

Planetary Annihilation brought in $2.2 million in Kickstarter funding for Uber Entertainment, and the full game has now been released after a two-year development cycle. This is one of the largest Kickstarter campaigns in gaming, and the team seems to have had fun experimenting with the world of…

The era of stealing your friend's co-worker's parents' HBO Go login may be drawing to close. At an investment conference, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that the company was finally considering offering the streaming service to anyone who wanted to pay for it, whether or not they had a cable…