Jump to Justin Ma and Matthew Davis are glued to the computers in their Shanghai apartments. Sitting in dark rooms lit by the glow of their monitors, the game developers watch their screens in disbelief. They've just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their game FTL: Faster Than Light . Having…

1. Seinfeld premiered 25 years ago as The Seinfeld Chronicles . I remember this because I was watching. It was a hot summer and I was at my grandparents’ house in northeastern Pennsylvania. Because there was little else to do, I often read TV Guide like a magazine. (Why it took me another two…

Once it’s clear the cruiser is gone, Haefner doubles the truck back to his original spot. We tumble out and sling on backpacks full of food, water, and gear. The camera equipment alone—digital SLRs, lenses, lights, and tripods—works out to 20 pounds per person. Attire is dark clothes in layers:…

In this promotional photo shot for SC Johnson, TV star Jennie Garth sprays the crowd with orange at the Shout Color Throw on June 21 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Events like this one are being held in Europe and the United States, but most organizers don't mention that these events are inspired…

Over the last 10 or 15 years, a wave of filmmakers have worked to reconcile the spontaneity and innovation of sketch comedy with the demands of narrative film. David Wain is one of them. Since their beloved MTV sketch show The State , Wain and his collaborators—Michael Ian Black and Michael…

Community promo image Community , one of the cool-cool-coolest shows on television, was saved on Monday by Yahoo of all things—a tech company known for being not cool at all. Even Yahoo’s own CFO said in 2013 Yahoo wasn’t very cool, and then spent a billion dollars trying to get that youthful je ne…

LUCK BE A LADY Hollywood big shots and assorted billionaires could win or lose millions in a night at one of Molly Bloom’s poker games. At 6:45 P.M. I stood by the front door and waited. I fidgeted with my dress. I started to feel insecure about how to greet the players. I knew their names, but did…

Those were the days … a roadie in the 70s. Photograph: Neal Preston B efore the live-music industry became a billion-dollar behemoth, being on the road was, for many bands, a wild west of sex, drugs and even some rock'n'roll. Hedonism was rife, and it wasn't just the musicians who pillaged. Their…

Edward Davis Wood Jr. died on December 10, 1978. Three days earlier, Wood and his wife Kathy had been evicted from their apartment on the corner of Cahuenga Boulevard and Yucca Street in Los Angeles. Carrying the few possessions they saved from the Dumpster (including an angora sweater and a copy of…

When Fox unveiled its 2014-15 schedule to advertisers in May, soon-to-be-former network head Kevin Reilly introduced one of its new sitcoms, Mulaney , as having “ the makings of a Seinfeld for a new generation .” It was an eyebrow-raiser, partly because (1) talk about setting the bar high for the…

Uncompromising, bruising, loud, groundbreaking—Public Enemy’s 1988 landmark work “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” has been celebrated as the greatest hip-hop album of all time, amongst other grandiose titles. And such talk is no mere hyperbole. The thunderous voice of frontman Chuck D…

About a month ago, Brooklyn rapper Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire released a song online about signing with a major record label and then getting dropped, having accomplished exactly nothing. The song was called “I Ain’t Even Fuck Rihanna,” and the key line was, “My stupid ass sold his soul/and didn’t…

“I wonder if my brother remembers his brother?” - Tuco (Eli Wallach) in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) We lost Eli Wallach on June 24th at the ripe old age of 98. The talented actor was beloved by film fans and fellow actors so quickly cobbled together obituaries as well as many heartfelt…

Ed Brubaker: Here's that Wired piece on VELVET for any who missed it: http://t.co/jpEE1w2kGb

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Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the…

I wish that the first time I had sex with a man had been in a video game. Instead, it was the second. And he really wasn't a man at all, so much as a bundle of pixels and sprites. That's why I wish I could've done things differently, though. Because the first man I had sex with was very real, and so…

Grantland: Age of Exhaustion: The Year of the Self-Loathing Summer Movie, by @PAPPADEMAS http://t.co/Z2Melnzzt4

The breakfast with Jeff Bezos started awkwardly and ended with an indignity that Matt Rutledge didn’t even catch at first. The waitress at Lola, a trendy Seattle restaurant owned by celebrity chef Tom Douglas, didn’t recognize Bezos. But she sensed she should have. When she stumbled over his name,…

As a boy, I'd visit my grandparents' house each summer. We'd watch epic tennis games from Wimbledon. This was the 1970s, when top tennis players were big personalities. My grandparents were delighted by boisterous, emotionally hostile male players like John McEnroe, forever hooting at umpires and…

My dog Murray and I were taking our usual amble through town the other day, when we came upon a puppy we hadn't seen before. I don't know a lot of my human neighbors, but I've got a pretty comprehensive roster of all the dogs around town. We stopped to get to know this little golden bundle of…

When Simple Isn't Good Enough : Director Philip Kaufman is once again the center of a storm with his adaptation of Michael Crichton's bestseller 'Rising Sun' NEW YORK — "Rising Sun," the bestseller about murder and intrigue in the Los Angeles headquarters of a Japanese conglomerate, is characterized…

Image: Call of Duty /psu.edu It's OK to join the Thieve's Guild. Go forth and conquer New Vegas with Caesar's Legion, enact sadistic tortures on heroes in a dungeon of your own design, plant a payload of C4 on a public street, or maybe just destroy all humans(!) in the most unambiguous sense.…

By STEVE LOHR via NYT Technology

I was a bigot. Hence, I can sympathize with all those who still are. I was terrified of pit bulls. I knew very little about them, but what I'd heard in the media sure sounded terrifying: how their jaws locked; how they were uniquely bred to kill humans; how the nicest of them -- unlike other dogs --…

By FARHAD MANJOO via NYT Technology

Photo: Ben Margot/AP2012 The funniest thing about the legacy of Moneyball, the 2003 Michael Lewis book and the 2011 Brad Pitt movie, is that it quickly became an ongoing leadership seminar about losers. Back in 2003, before disrupt became a buzzword in every Silicon Valley start-up, Billy Beane and…

In the depths of the Russian State Library, Marina Chestnykh takes the creaking elevator up to the ninth floor. She walks past stack after stack of books behind metal cages, the shelves barely visible in the dim light from the frosted-glass windows. This is the spetskhran , or old special storage…

Electronic Dance Music didn’t grow into a serious industry in America until it was boiled down into those three little letters. Like KFC or MTV, EDM is an acronym that implies a lot about a substance that may or may not be contained in the actual product. But the idea behind an acronym like EDM…

Illustration by Christoph Niemann The past few years have been very good to Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, the giant private-equity firm. His industry, which relies on borrowed money, has benefitted from low interest rates, and the stock-market boom has given…

Pretty much everything about this story will seem old. Maybe laughably so. Let’s get that out of the way. Technology is in a perpetual state of relentless, preposterous forward motion, and we’re constantly reminded that we’re already somehow living in the future, today. But I'm talking about an…

No company has done more to change the way Americans drink coffee in the last several years than Keurig Green Mountain. Its method of brewing coffee by injecting hot water into prepackaged plastic pods has quickly grown to rival drip coffee as the preferred means of getting a quick hit of caffeine.…

“We needed an anthem,” Spike Lee said. “When I wrote the script for Do the Right Thing , every time when the Radio Raheem character showed up, he had music blasting. I wanted Public Enemy.” The director may have asked for an anthem for his 1989 chronicle of big-city racial tensions, but what he got…

June 29: Updated with statement from Facebook, from the author of the study, and from the editor of the academic journal that published the study. Facebook is the best human research lab ever. There’s no need to get experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms as they’ve already agreed to the…

Ridley Scott’s lush 2001 adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal was both a beneficiary and a victim of its predecessor’s success. The triumph of Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-festooned 1991 adaptation of Harris’ Silence Of The Lambs— and the public’s enduring fascination with its flesh-eating psychiatrist…

In the early 1990s, Michael Crichton accomplished the writer/creator equivalent of an EGOT, an acronym for winning the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards, coined by Philip Michael Thomas and made famous by 30 Rock . Crichton scored a No. 1 movie ( Jurassic Park ), a top-rated television show ( ER…

Welcome to the second and final entry in Michael Crichton Month here at Forgotbusters, a month dedicated to screen adaptations of early-1990s thrillers written to warn unsuspecting white male America about the dangers posed to them—by sexually assertive businesswomen with perfect breasts , and by…

In 2006, I switched from PC to Mac in the midst of an aesthetic sea change called Web 2.0. Overnight, all my buttons and toggles became aqueous, squishy blobs. For my entire young life as a computer user, that place had been populated with beige file folders and gray boxes; now it had metamorphosed…