The so-called Google barge, once envisioned as a floating showroom for Google Glass and other high-tech gadgets, is heading for a less glamorous future now that the structure on top of it is destined for the scrap yard. It’s a pitiful end for a great mystery that generated national attention when…

Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer…

We’ve all felt the brunt of annoying and gimmicky advertising. Often brands try desperately to appeal to us by hopping on the latest trend, slang phrase, or pop star, only to fall flat—or produce the total opposite response of what was intended. Oops. But Millennials are actually changing things for…

Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, in which a New Jersey man named Gary Brolsma danced in his chair to a Moldovan pop song called “Dragostea din tei. ” The video is blurry; it’s from the world…

Copyright scholars have long been pretty certain that "Happy Birthday to You" is in the public domain, despite the fact that Warner/Chappell claims copyright on it and charges impressive licensing fees to use it in public performances. Those fees, however, are much lower than a copyright lawsuit…

James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge, and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational. More importantly,…

In last week’s “After Midnight” column, I wrote about Scream! Factory’s terrific special edition Blu-ray of the teen werewolf movie Ginger Snaps , which contains a documentary about the making of the film, including one particularly insightful anecdote. Several people who worked on Ginger Snaps talk…

Dear Nicki Minaj, I own AllHipHop.com. AllHipHop has been historically uber supportive of the rapper Nicki Minaj. That’s YOU, homie! When I say historically, we can take it all the way back to when you had to stand in line to get into parties or those grimy underground videos you once pumped out on…

For the title character of Lucy , the silly but stylish new Luc Besson thriller about a woman who accidentally accesses the full, dormant power of the human brain, superpowers are kind of a drag. For one thing, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) only gains those powers because she’s kidnapped, terrorized,…

Artists have always cannibalized other media, all the way back to the Babylonian scribe with the bright idea of stringing a bunch of Sumerian poems together into a single epic . So it’s no surprise that movies and videogames have been borrowing from each other for years. What’s surprising is what a…

Like Us On Facebook Follow Us On Twitter Esquire Follow Us On Pinterest Esquire Sign Up For Our Newsletter Style Politics Women Entertainment Subscribe Give A Gift Digital Edition Lifestyle People Who Cheat Don't Like Being Cheated On A definitive indicator? Not exactly. Something to keep in mind?…

An Israeli strike over Gaza City. (AP Photo / Hatem Moussa) Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8…

John Rogers, president of Comic-Con, writes down issues Con attendees have had with the event. Todd VanDerWerff/Vox Sitting at the front of the room, only occasionally cracking a smile at the long line of people that has queued up largely to accost him, John Rogers diligently takes notes. He has the…

Photo: Kerry Brown/Courtesy of Roadside Attractions Two thousand fourteen is only half over, yet the year in culture has already been dominated by people who are dead. I don’t mean people like Elvis and Shakespeare, whose work endures long after their passing; I mean people like Michael Jackson,…

From the first frame of his cinematic directorial debut, 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Judd Apatow has displayed a gift for creating characters so well-defined that we feel like we’ve known them forever. This gift for instant characterization, honed through close collaboration with his actors, many…

Ira Glass is a writer, producer, storyteller, performer, and a familiar voice. His show This American Life has set the contemporary standard of nonfiction radio shows, and has influenced and inspired countless others to grab a mic and give podcasting a try. But business as usual is apparently not…

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The Expendables 3 comes out August 15th in thousands of theaters across America. I watched it Friday afternoon on my MacBook Air on a packed train from New York City to middle-of-nowhere Connecticut. I watched it again on the ride back. And I'm already counting down the days until I can see it in…

Grantland: Blockbuster Talk: @Wesley_Morris and @mollylambert on the all-powerful Scarlett Johansson and the ridiculous 'Lucy' http://t.co/lGMbzEwCP1

Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, and Caesar the chimp strive for peace on the planet. Illustration by Tomer Hanuka It was crucial, with “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), to stay to the bittersweet end. A regiment of apes, loosed from bondage and commanded by a chimp named Caesar, the king of the…

The other true story behind ‘Orange Is the New Black’ By Larry Smith Portraits by Ryan Pfluger I was 29 years old and living the dream, or at least my version of it, when everything changed. I was in love with an amazing woman and had a rent-controlled sublet in New York City’s West Village and a…

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The American electorate is often upset, but a recent poll by Quinnipiac University was still a surprise. It had Barack Obama coming in last among all postwar Presidents, twelfth out of twelve. That’s got to be deflating for Obama, although he may find solace in an approval rating that still hovers…

I n simpler and more caveman-ish times, we would have called this piece “Sports Movie or Chick Flick?” That’s an easier premise than “Sports Movie or Rom-Com?” (doesn’t account for dramas), “Sports Movie, Rom-Com or Rom-Dram?” (the word Rom-Dram looks like a new erectile dysfunction drug), “Sports…

In 1998 the journalist Ron Rosenbaum published Contrary to what the title might suggest, it is not an explanation of Hitler, per se, but rather a 500-page meta-analysis of different theories intended to explain Hitler. Ron Rosenbaum traveled from the ruins of Hitler's Austrian birthplace to meet the…

The early trailer for Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy,” promised giddy digital wizardry , and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp-fiction setup (though I couldn’t foresee the gore). I knew that it would involve Scarlett Johansson displaying supernatural…

It’s easy to understand why Comedy Central’s Nathan For You struggled to attract much attention when it debuted in April of 2013. A show about Nathan Fielder, a largely unknown Canadian comedian, trying to improve small businesses doesn’t sound all that exciting on paper, and ratings were dismal all…

Image: Shutterstock Rumors are swirling that as governments move to integrate and legitimize bitcoin, it could have a divisive and lasting effect on the virtual payment system. Forcing regulations on bitcoin could divide the digital currency into two camps: coins that are regulated and managed by a…

A glowing disco ball spins above a tiny, well-stocked bar in a dingy basement. Across the room are two armchairs, one with a horse mask resting on top, the other with a chicken mask. Resting in between is a tip jar filled with cash. The walls are lined with fan art from bloody indie games like…

Image via the artist You remember Vulfpeck, right? That'd be the Los Angeles funk band made internet-famous for releasing a record on Spotify consisting entirely of silence, accompanied by the instruction that it was to be listened to while sleeping: put the thing on repeat and head to bed. This…

Image: Amazon.com screengrab Amazon's Fire Phone, the company's much-discussed foray into the smartphone market , has begun shipping. Thus far, reviewers have focused on its flashy , gimmicky features, but the biggest thing that sets the Fire apart from its Android and Apple competitors probably…

Fans in line for Comic-Con's Hall H. Chris Schodt It was 3:55AM when we reached the end of the line. We’d already walked a full 1.09 miles, past people fast asleep in sleeping bags and lawn chairs, camped out from midday the day before. Doors wouldn’t open for another six hours. As we walked down…

David Sparshott Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. But despite the inadvertent hilarity, the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how…

When Kim’s Video & Music announced that this summer it would be closing its last store, on First Avenue in the East Village, written tributes ranged from the resigned to the exultant. “Kim’s was this portal into New York City I never came back from,” Eddie Huang, the restaurateur, author and…