In March, a bewildered retired man faced journalists yelling questions about virtual currency outside his suburban home in Temple City, California. Dorian Nakamoto, 64, had been identified by Newsweek as the person who masterminded Bitcoin—a story that, like previous attempts to unmask its…

In the 1990s, Demi Moore became highest-paid female movie star in the world playing aggressive, strong-willed women who trade on their sexuality to get ahead. She lucratively played a stripper in 1996’s Striptease, a voracious sexual harasser in previous Forgotbusters entry Disclosure , and most…

There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken…

When Sylvester Stallone’s Expendables 3 character, Barney Ross, realizes his latest adversary, Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), packs more heat than even old-timer Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) can handle, he hits up his longtime friend Bonaparte (Kelsey Grammer) to wrangle a fresh-faced team of…

My favorite line from any John le Carré novel (at the moment, at least; it changes all the time) is from Little Drummer Girl : “Somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle.” He was writing about an investigation into an explosion at an Israeli diplomat’s home in Germany. It’s one of the few…

Executives at Starbucks don’t market to children. The coffee company seems to have plenty of loyal grade-school-aged customers, anyway, at least in the US, because of a few drinks that lend themselves to kid-friendly twists. Ask a barista for a cotton candy Frappuccino, for example, and she’ll…

A second American infected with the potentially deadly Ebola virus arrived at Emory University Hospital on Tuesday from Africa, following the first patient last weekend. Both were greeted by a team of highly trained physicians and nurses, a specialized isolation unit, extensive media coverage, and a…

On Aug. 14, 1994, I started playing a game that, one way or another, I've been playing ever since. On that day I joined eight friends for some drinks in Glossop, England (above), to play our first game of Fantasy League. It's a very simple numbers game based on the playing statistics of the English…

W hen you decide that spending about 27 work hours determining the holders of the American Band Championship Belt going back to 1964 is a good, even noble idea, you quickly come up against two inconvenient facts. 1 One, many of the best bands ever aren’t from the United States. You could even say…

This week’s Frank follows a rock band called the Soronprfbs fronted by an eccentric man in a giant round papier-mâché head (and played by Michael Fassbender). The group is fictional (though loosely based on a real English group fronted by a man in a similarly faux cranium ), but they have legitimate…

The world of Frank Miller’s “Sin City” is black and white in almost every sense. In these popular graphic novels and their film adaptations, Mr. Miller, the author, illustrator and filmmaker, presents a fictional metropolis as monochromatic in hue as in values: mean streets populated with…

"I don't want to go to bed at night thinking I've ruined thousands of people's fun," one of the two men who's cracked open the code for the Wii U's biggest game told me this week. I was confused. This was Chadderz, a programmer who, with his brother Bean, has hacked Mario Kart 8 to do amazing…

If you're going to launch a Kickstarter, especially in gaming, be prepared to respond to skeptics—quickly, thoroughly, and with plenty of evidence. The developers behind Night Trap ReVamped are learning this the hard way. For their proposed high-definition re-release of the controversial 1992 Sega…

E.Z. Mike Simpson of the Dust Brothers, circa 1989. Photo courtesy of Mario Caldato Jr. Upon my first occasion to visit the Dust Brothers’ legendary studio, PCP Labs, in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, I stepped to Michael “E.Z. Mike” Simpson like De La Soul: “Please listen to my demo.” Mike,…

Last week, the great culture writer and author Mark Harris ( Pictures At A Revolution , Five Came Back ) tweeted a startling fact: “Number of 2014’s 10 highest-grossing movies that are not remakes, sequels, or adaptations of material for children: 0.” He followed up by noting that the Top 5 in…

Large X + pics Latest Entertainment News Headlines Movie News 08.08.2014 by: M. Night Shyamalan delivered some solid cinema with (arguably) his first three films, and quickly turned into a joke afterwards. LADY IN THE WATER underperformed, THE HAPPENING was one of the most unintentionally funny…

If you hadn't heard of Amazon's e-book pricing scuffle with publisher Hachette before the weekend, you probably have now. What started as a business dispute—usually rather boring affairs for suits to discuss in closed rooms—has escalated into a very public mud-slinging match. And like a playground…

Photograph by Mary Cybulski/Cinemax. I share my colleague Emily Nussbaum’s disappointment with Steven Soderbergh’s “The Knick,” his Cinemax series set in a downtown Manhattan hospital, in 1900. (For that matter, the first disappointment, for me, is the opening shot, which shows a slender young woman…

Photograph by Rachel Pincus Are you relatively new to this bustling metropolis? Don't be shy about it, everyone was new to New York once upon a time, except, of course, those battle-hardened residents who've lived here their whole lives and Know It All. One of these lifers works among us at…

Originally published August 9, 2014 at 6:58 PM | Page modified August 10, 2014 at 9:05 PM Share: Comments E-mail article In 12 cities across the Northwest, college players compete each summer in the wooden-bat West Coast League, trying to keep their baseball dreams alive. Seattle Times staff…

"Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship. As well as abstaining from sexual thoughts, sexual touching, pornography,…

Computational photography research explores the power of AI and computer vision, pushing the limits of what is possible by helping people fully and easily utilize technology with innovative photography apps and services. Phone Applications Microsoft Pix Microsoft Pix is a smart camera app that…

Contributor on 08.05.14 in Features Ali Hedrick seems surprised by the extent of the festival database she keeps. An agent for nearly two decades at Billions , one of the country’s highest-profile booking agencies for what might very broadly be termed independent music, Hedrick helps compile an…

It’s hard to overstate the impact David Byrne had on me—and, I imagine, every kid who ever grew up feeling like an outcast. Byrne didn’t just make being weird seem okay or acceptable; he made being weird seem like a state of grace. Byrne seemed to occupy a realm beyond that of mere mortals, existing…

Paul Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40 years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records precious: music…

xhacker02 If you ask 10 different people, "What is art?", chances are you'll get 10 different answers. To 17 bidders on eBay, the answer this week would be a screenshot of a 4chan post. Opening at a minimum bid of $500 and finishing just four days later on 1 August at $90,900, the screenshot --…

It was only a matter of time before some enterprising young thinker took a look at the growing world of smartwatches, fitness trackers , and other such digital bands and thought, "Hey, I bet I know where we could put one of these!" Enter the "SexFit." It's a device for men designed with the same…

Some achievements are too easy, at times only requiring players to do mundane things like pressing start. Some achievements pose an actual challenge to players, requiring people to earn their digital trophies. And some achievements? Some achievements just aren't possible, no matter what a game might…

Last week, Universal and Focus Features released the first trailer for director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel’s adaptation of E.L. James’ bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey , which generated a lot of comment from readers, mostly having to do with the crumminess of…

David Pierce’s “I torrented ‘The Expendables 3’ and I’m still going to see it in theaters,” , is labeled an editorial, but it’s more like a cross between a breathless fanboy review and a starry-eyed techno-Utopian fantasy. Pierce doesn’t quite come out and say that he torrented a leaked copy of the…

I t was just after she’d had her first child that Janet Bloomfield realized she didn’t want to go back to work and pay some nanny to raise her kids. She had gone to college to study film theory and assumed, like practically every American woman does, that she would start a career before marrying and…

Sexuality and Sex Comedy Tasha: On the most recent episode of The Dissolve Podcast , we used Sex Tape as a springboard for a conversation about sex comedies, and why so many of the ones aimed at adults fail. One of the conclusions we reached: Teen sex comedies are often about failure and…

Lucy by Vadim Rizov in Filmmaking on Jul 28, 2014 In a statement published in the Nov. 24, 1962 Film Culture , Pier Paolo Pasolini thought about how a simple metaphor can be conveyed onscreen, starting from one solution he rejected as overall unsound: “Let us consider the following written or spoken…

When I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, I was so excited about computer vision that I chose to implement a cutting-edge paper on recognizing machine parts as my final-year project. Even though those parts were simple silhouettes of basic shapes like triangles and cogs, my project barely worked at…