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…

Six Brew Bantha playing in a loft There's something fucked up about Victoria, British Columbia’s underground punk scene. And we're not talking fucked up, like broken, but fucked up, like weird, and cool, and different. It could be the isolated location of Vancouver Island (you have to take a ferry…

By Rachael Maddux It’s barely September, and the afternoon light has finally mellowed enough that it no longer seems preposterous that the kids in my neighborhood are back in school. For weeks now I’ve watched as they walk out in the mornings, already sweating in the heavy air of a far-from-over…

Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. on a report in The Daily Caller which alleged that the federal government is applying pressure on businesses to unionize. Working Americans are woefully underrepresented in our mainstream media. According to an analysis by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting…

Here's the frightening implication of a landmark study on carbon emissions: By 2018, no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again, unless they're either replacements for old ones or carbon neutral. Otherwise greenhouse gas…

Until this week, I'd never played The Sims. I knew it was a popular series. But for whatever reason, I'd just never played it.. ...okay. Maybe not "for whatever reason." There's an actual reason, I'm just ashamed to admit it. I avoided The Sims purely because of the stigma I always associated with…

Over the past twenty years, Rhode Island artist Sage Francis has made himself a Jack-of-all-Trades, and masters of them all. Sage’s list of achievements is extensive and varies over several fields of artistry. The Providence rapper released Sick of Waiting… his first mix-tape in 1999, which became…

Col. Morris Davis: Decaying #Guantánamo Defies Closing Plans http://t.co/jjWnc4Ny3I Comprehensive piece by @charlie_savage. $3M/yr per man, 1/2 clrd for trans.

M y message to the head of the Louvre would be to come and see how we are living here," said Tariq,* a carpenter's helper working on construction of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a $653 million Middle Eastern outpost of the iconic Parisian museum. Set to be completed in 2015, its collection will include a…

The Criterion Collection’s mission is simple: it’s billed as “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films,” that seeks to gather “the greatest films from around the world” and package them in “editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original…

If you ask the bean-counters, this was a disappointing summer: Almost every major sequel underperformed ( Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were all the lowest-grossing entries in their respective series), and there were some truly ugly flops, most notably for Seth…

On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 A.M. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity…

David Chase (Francois Durand/Getty Images) Wednesday morning, we published a piece in which David Chase told writer Martha P. Nochimson that Tony Soprano had survived the series finale of The Sopranos . The finale, which ended with a famous cut to black that left Tony in a state of suspended…

The extremists who have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq have riveted the world’s attention with their military prowess and unrestrained brutality. But Western intelligence services are also worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos,…

The first triumph of Rian Johnson’s fiendishly clever 2005 directorial debut Brick is that it isn’t terrible. In the wrong hands, the film’s central conceit—juxtaposing the shadowy, cynical world of film noir and hard-boiled fiction with the even grimmer, even more shadowy and cynical world of…

Eric Love isn’t on a redemption arc. The protagonist of the new prison drama Starred Up is a seemingly unrepentant, defiant murderer who carries violence around as his first, last, and almost every option. He doesn’t attack in every situation, but once someone else does, he escalates ruthlessly and…

With the news he is dating FKA twigs , the British singer of the alien sex-jam “Two Weeks,” Robert Pattinson has completed one of the most stunning turnarounds in movie-star history. Five years ago, Pattinson was an expressionless Topshop mannequin being paid A-Rod money to brood in the most…

The last man on Earth whom taxpayers should be subsidizing. Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images Dan Snyder has been an NFL owner for 15 years. In that time, Snyder’s team has sued a grandmother for failing to make her season ticket payments, charged $25 for parking at Fan Appreciation Day, sold…

Towards the end of the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead , the player is asked to smear the decaying remains of a corpse over a small child. At the tail-end of a narrative that has already seen the girl, Clementine, separated from her home and her parents, it acts as something of a…

Getty Remember when 3G was such a big deal that Apple named its new iPhone after what was then the new standard in mobile data transmission? The iPhone 3G, introduced in 2008, was the second iteration of the pioneering smartphone, and in a way the name was as much gloating as it was tribute. When…

BROTHERS GRIM | 'It's been an uncompromising, fantastic creative process,' says Reznor (left) of scoring films with Ross (right) for Fincher. Photography by Pari Dukovic for WSJ. Magazine MUSICIANS TRENT REZNOR and Atticus Ross are sitting in a studio in Hollywood, staring down the barrel of a…

British Columbia had the lowest paid teachers in Canada and faced classrooms with the most students per educator in Canada as of 2011. Whew! I’m glad I got that off my chest. These are the facts, well documented by Statistics Canada in its lovingly titled reports Education Indicators in Canada: An…

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Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service . For inquiries related to this message please contact support . For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot…

Over at the New Yorker , Ben McGrath has a brief, characteristically thoughtful essay up about a question that people have been asking basically for as long as the game has been played but which, lately, seems to actually have something to it: What's wrong with baseball? As he freely concedes, going…

A crowd-pleasing chronicle of the life and times of exuberant pitcher Dock Ellis, who famously pitched a no-hitter while out of his mind on LSD, No No: A Dockumentary is somewhat perversely a film about a journey to sobriety that will best be enjoyed by viewers who are at least a little buzzed.…

Taxi Driver is considered one of the classics of Martin Scorsese’s filmography, but when that title is mentioned most don’t think of the film, they recall John Hinckley Jr. and his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. That association has undoubtedly been permanently seared into the…

The phrase “white privilege” is one that rubs a lot of white people the wrong way. It can trigger something in them that shuts down conversation or at least makes them very defensive. (Especially those who grew up relatively less privileged than other folks around them). And I’ve seen more than once…

SAN FRANCISCO — Millions of Americans use smartphones for tasks like hailing a taxi or checking in for a flight. But for buying something in a store? That mostly remains a tech entrepreneur’s dream. For years now, the promise of a so-called mobile wallet — in which paying in person can be as simple…