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…

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words) Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison , by Sabine Heinlein . Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent…

Peter Molyneux is crying. I’m not sure how to react to this. Legendary game designers don’t often get emotional with the press. But here’s Molyneux, who has made so many games and done so many interviews over the past two decades, openly weeping into my voice recorder. We’re talking about promises.…

Check out our slideshow of Social Club vests HERE! The guy is drunk. Obviously drunk. Shitfaced. Instead of joining the 10-person line politely waiting to use the men's room at Disney California Adventure, the twentysomething in an oversized T-shirt and low-slung hat cuts in front of the surprised,…

Last April, Dong Nguyen, a quiet 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis, spent a holiday weekend making a mobile game. He wanted it to be simple but challenging, in the spirit of the Nintendo games he grew up playing. The…

I'm standing in front of Space Mountain worrrying I won't be able to find the Neverlanders Social Club. It's an ordinary Sunday in Disneyland in November—sunny and beautiful in that Californian way and packed to the gills with tourists—and I'm concerned I'll miss them in all the hubbub. They told me…

Editor’s note: David “The Masked Man” Shoemaker (Grantland’s wrestling guru) and Bill Simmons (35-year wrestling fan) spent the past 10 days digesting the new WWE Network, which launched on February 24 and caused a multimedia riot in the wrestling community. Is this one of the great moments in WWE…

Jump to The flight to Thailand was long. Stephen de Souza wished it were longer. Over the previous decade, from 1982 to 1992, de Souza had established himself as a screenwriting wunderkind. Most screenwriters can't land one blockbuster; he had a baker's dozen to his name, including Commando , The…

Zwirner at home, with a painting by Raymond Pettibon. “Nobody’s selling expensive stuff like we do with the frequency we do,” Zwirner said. “This is an industry in its golden age.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic Very important people line up differently from you and me. They don’t want to stand behind…

As a longtime film critic, I’ve noticed a strange contradiction. I became a critic because I love movies, yet I feel professionally obligated to take umbrage with movies that feel too much like movies. I get irritated when confronted with a plot I’ve seen countless times before, or characters that…

The following is excerpted from Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s , which is available now on Amazon . $13 Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers… From amazon 14 bought by readers GMG may get a commission Buy now If one were in with…

A cyclist passes a steam vent in the financial district of Toronto; not a welcoming city on two wheels. Photograph: Andy Clark/Reuters. Story courtesy of Mosaic I t was just another morning commute. That is, until a bus driver ran a red light, turned right, and drove straight into Ann-Doerthe Hass…