B efore Steve McQueen, Hollywood didn’t produce action movies in the modern sense. You never saw John Wayne trapped on a luxury yacht with scheming terrorists, or Paul Newman tearing through Paris to find his kidnapped daughter. If you needed a testosterone fix, you survived on a never-ending slew…

"A good roller coaster is better than sex." (Michael Quinn, Letters to the Editor: Oui magazine , January 1978) Perhaps no other creation in history has navigated the divide between terror and unadulterated joy as skillfully as the roller coaster. Since these “scream machines” were introduced nearly…

“Stereotypes are a real time-saver.” Like so many things, this wry gag was around long before The Onion perfectly codified it and left Internet readers with an easy reference point to share whenever they’re ironically justifying some shameful belief, or accusing someone else of doing it. Horror…

VICE: Toronto Man Accidentally Makes Documentary About His Porno Obsession http://t.co/zxrmby1vrt

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One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars…

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched. Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the…

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Though the show has movie-star charisma, it reeks of macho nonsense. Illustration by Victor Melamed Judged purely on style, HBO’s “True Detective” is a great show. Every week, it offers up shiver-inducing cable intoxicants, from an over-the-top action sequence so liquid it rivals a Scorsese flick to…

Two weeks ago, I published a critical article about HBO’s “True Detective” in which I argued that, as stylish and as well acted as the series was, it had a hollow center. Beneath its auteurist trappings, the show boiled down to bickering cops hunting a sinister “rape club”—a plot that has been done…

VANITY FAIR: How @ToddBarry built a stand-up show with no material and got @LouisCK to make it a special http://t.co/v0bh2McAEn

Roll over, Tchaikovsky. Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images Our mission: to dissect chart-topping pop singles and weigh their trembling flesh on the scales of Western music theory. Today I am typing about the unique genius of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” From her early singles onward—“Just Dance”…

Scott: Before diving into Darren Aronofsky’s Noah specifically, let’s start by getting a sense of the director’s career in general. Noah is only his sixth feature since 1998, when he broke through with Pi , a prime example of innovation on a low budget, and it’s his second major studio movie (not…

Errol Morris on photography. Read Part 1; Part 2; Part 3. 4. ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE ISN’T EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE Wikipedia The phrase “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” has been attributed to Martin Rees, O.M., astronomer royal, former master of Trinity College, and ex-president of the Royal…

Errol Morris on photography. Read Part 1; Part 2; Part 4. 3. A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION Wikipedia Rumsfeld’s life is bookended by two major historical events, two surprise attacks — the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 when he was 9 years old and 60 years later, the attack on the World Trade Center and…

Errol Morris on photography. Read Part 1; Part 3; Part 4. 2. THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN ©1983 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from TIME and published with permission of Time Inc. Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without written permission prohibited. The phrase…

Errol Morris on photography. Read Part 2; Part 3; Part 4. 1. THREE REPORTERS Ted Bafaloukos Four kinds of persons: zeal without knowledge; knowledge without zeal; neither knowledge nor zeal; both zeal and knowledge. – Pascal, Pensées C-SPAN Video Library When I first met Donald Rumsfeld in his…

Logan Smith: Taking White Noah to its logical conclusions http://t.co/VPXsviG0ih

Monopoly, with its little red houses and pink five dollar bills and old-timey caricatures of J. P. Morgan, is a standard at family nights around America. But there’s something weird about Monopoly’s popularity. For one thing, it is a game that lionizes unregulated and potentially ruinous corporate…

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps legendary filmmaker Terrence Malick knew this when he worried aloud and said in his last interview in the 1970s, “From this point on. I’m being watched. That could trip me up.” Malick wasn’t referring to detectives — though cinephiles possibly could have…

“If I’m willing to pay $100 for someone to bring me a glass of fresh milk from an Omaha dairy cow right now, there might very well be a guy who would be super happy to do that, but he doesn’t know that I’m the crazy guy who is willing to pay $100.” Bo Fishback was on stage at the “Big Omaha” startup…

The Wu-Tang Clan will sell only one copy of its secret album, which currently resides in a handcrafted silver box in Morocco. Somewhere on the outskirts of Marrakech, Morocco, inside a vault housed beneath the shadow of the Atlas Mountains, there sits an engraved silver-and-nickel box with the…

The Movie Mezzanine Filmmaker Retrospective series takes on an entire body of work–be it director’s, screenwriter’s, or otherwise–and analyzes each portion of the filmography. By the final post of a retrospective, there will be a better understanding of the filmmaker in question, the central themes…

Martin Scorsese has had recurring collaborations with certain actors (such as Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci), and crew members (such as cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and writers Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin), but no collaborator is as closely identified with…

Grantland: Unpacking the terribleness of this dead-celebrity-filled Dutch beer commercial, by @PhloxLombardi http://t.co/jtSNMDbKjF

After a series of deplorable, headline-grabbing events on university campuses, the term “rape culture” has entered the popular lexicon in Canada. During the current academic year, we heard about chants promoting the sexual assault of underage girls at both Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and the…

Katy Perry. Photo by SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images In the days since Ted Gioia published his essay in the Daily Beast , alleging that music criticism has devolved into lifestyle reporting, with little or no attention paid to how the music itself works, I've been challenged by friends on Facebook to…

All illustrations by Skip Sterling B etting on sports is only legal in four states: Delaware, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon. The rest of the country has to make its bets illegally, through bookies. As with any enterprise that holds the promise of easy money, there’s never a shortage of hungry gamblers…

“He’s probably been whipped around a school yard by a bully sometime, but put a bowling ball in his hand and lookout, he’s Superman. If this doesn’t get your heart pumping, I doubt there’s much that will.” -- Newscaster Nelson "Bo" Burton Jr. on bowler Bob Benoit ( 1988 ) There was a time when…

Headline a film, and there are plenty of opportunities to deliver a memorable performance. But drop in for just one scene, and leaving a lasting impression becomes that much more difficult. As the Hollywood Reporter recently noted , studios have increasingly partaken in a practice called "boarding,"…

A willowy production assistant — headset, clipboard, and all — has just wandered out of the swirling dust and Tennessee summer heat, and into the Wu-Tang Clan’s trailer at Bonnaroo. She’s come with enough temerity, bless her young heart, to request a set list. A set list? A set list? RZA is a bit…

Campo Santo's first game draws inspiration from BioShock and Metroid Prime. Here's our first look. Firewatch, the recently-announced first game from developer Campo Santo, is refreshing. That’s the word I keep coming back to when I think back to the three hours I spent with the team a few weeks ago,…

Clive Thompson: How to game Spotify: Record an album of silence and have your fans stream it on infinite repeat while they sleep -- http://t.co/0kWsd4qF1C

Grantland: I was an Arcade Fire bobblehead decoy, by @AmosBarshad http://t.co/e7YWM4FFky

Roger Angell and Andy; Central Park, January, 2014. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who…

“Where were you in ’62?” the tagline for American Graffiti famously inquired, seemingly secure in the knowledge that for most audiences, the answer would be substantially different than where they were in 1973, when the film came out. From the vantage point of 1973, 1962 must have seemed like…

When Daehee Park and JT Marino left the tech startup they worked for to strike out on their own, they looked for a different pace, perhaps something in an “old-fashioned industry” ripe for change. They landed in mattresses. The industry, dominated by the big S companies — Simmons, Serta and Sealy —…

Here's a fun game I play. First, I walk into a mattress store and ask what's on sale. Then, I throw my hands in the air and shout along with the salesman, "EVERYTHING'S ON SALE!!!!" Oh how we laugh, the salesman and I. And while he's still chuckling, I turn around and walk out, because I fricking…