Paul W.S. Anderson is a visionary director. Those visions include a red-drenched adaptation of the most popular fighting video game of all time, a mash-up of two iconic science-fiction monsters, and a steampunked take on a classic 19th-century adventure novel. But they are visions nonetheless, and…

When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’s headline was typical of the coverage: “ MIAMI ARTIST…

Sasha Frere-Jones: "Ukraine has essentially been frozen in time since independence.” — "Ukraine, Putin, and the West,” in @nplusonemag. http://t.co/P5dqjpyoj8

And the Oscar goes to… The gold trophy winners are announced, the red carpets rolled out, and yet another year at the Academy Awards passes without a Best Title Design category. So why isn’t there an Oscar for Best Title Design? After all, there are Academy Awards for other artistic and technical…

From a distance, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange looked like a towering example of renegade entrepreneurism. But on the inside, according to some who were there, Mt. Gox was a messy combination of poor management, neglect, and raw inexperience. Its collapse into bankruptcy last week — and the…

CALLING THE SHOTS Cinematographer Roger Deakins, photographed in Sydney, Australia. He is the snowy Beatles mop behind the lens of an award-winning list— Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, A Beautiful Mind —and has worked with moviedom’s greats: Sam Mendes, Martin Scorsese, Ron…

In September, David Gilmour, a writer and visiting professor at the University of Toronto, said in an interview that he tends to teach books by "serious heterosexual guys"; the interview went off like a starter pistol, and much of the Canadian literary internet responded, in both opposition and…

Image: Ubisoft/Far Cry 3 Despite the fact that a legitimate " queer games scene " has developed on the outskirts of the game industry, the mainstream has remained hesitant to create even a single gay protagonist. There are many openly gay developers working at large game companies, however, so why…

I'll tell you right now that I am not a celebrity. I know that may be hard to believe what with my extravagant lifestyle and frequent trips to both Marshalls and Ross for quality clothing at bargain prices. However, I've always wanted to live like a rock star (well, a rock star in their 50s who just…

Oh hey, the Oscars are on Sunday night! And congratulations to America's celebritiesfor enduring another painfully long and arduous awards season. YOU POOR THINGS! Being shuttled from red carpet to red carpet,forced to wear nice clothes, asked the same dumb questions over and over again("How's it…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but…

As he reaches his 50th birthday, MJ is still looking for one more ass to kick To continue reading this story, click here.

It was 5:30 in the morning when Kenya Mire looked down at her baby girl, Kendyll, who was curled up tight on a foldaway crib. “Night, night,” Kendyll had just murmured in her quiet, serious way. At 20 months, she was picking up all sorts of words, like “baby,” the name of the doll she kept nearby,…

photograph by Priscilla Iezzi About 40 miles north of the Irvine headquarters of In‑N‑Out Burger, the noonday sun makes the gritty industrial landscape of Baldwin Park simmer like a Double-Double fresh off the grill. Hulking tractor-trailers emblazoned with the fast-food chain’s familiar logo…

One hundred years ago, Joe Knowles stripped down to his jockstrap, said goodbye to civilization, and marched off into the woods to prove his survival skills. He was the reality star of his day. For eight weeks, rapt readers followed his adventures in the Boston Post . He returned home to a hero’s…

Photo: Christopher Anderson/ Magnum Photos/New York Magazine At a quiet table in a dimly lit Lower East Side Italian restaurant, Lauren Urasek, a poised 23-year-old makeup artist with a Cleopatra haircut and cherry-red lipstick, is lit by the glow of her iPhone as she flips through online-dating…

WASHINGTON, November 13 (By Carl Schreck for RIA Novosti) – It was a battle of the titans that defined the early 1980s as the Cold War was hitting its peak: Atari vs. Commodore. And Soviet diplomats, it seems, preferred Atari. With the Commodore 64 home computer pounding competitors, a Silicon…

In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” Construction by Ian Wright / Photograph by Ed Park Amazon is a global…

When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate…

Gone Home was an inspired, beautifully heartfelt thing that clearly had a profound affect on people of multiple codes and creeds. It was powerful, delicate, and… we’ve probably said everything about it that it’s possible for one website largely made up of hairy men to say. At some point, it becomes…

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness , The A.V. Club talks to…

Oregon Trail , the computer simulation that sends students on a sometimes perilous journey west in the 19th century and that made its way into classrooms across the country in the 1980s and 1990s (and beyond), was originally created by three student teachers — two who led math classrooms and one who…

This post was originally published on Priceonomics.com . Yeah, they say three years' salary. Michael Scott, The Office American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage -- they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will…

This morning, Maria Alekhina and Nadezdha Tolokonnikova, two member of the protest group Pussy Riot, were sitting in a McDonalds in Sochi when "around fifty" plainclothes police officers arrested them "for robbery," according to their Twitter feeds . They were out of prison for a little less than…

was sneaking Prince songs onto my Walkman as I practiced drums in the basement, pretending that I was listening to something less scandalous. The cassette reels spun around; that was a revolution. When I was 25, it was walking back to the van after opening for the Pharcyde but getting drawn back to…

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of…

This is a long article, meant to be read at your leisure. You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. Bob Dylan Technology changes tend to be of two types: incremental improvements or disruptive innovations. Incremental improvements allow one manufacturer…

A little more than 25 years ago, Orion Pictures released RoboCop , a grimly hysterical, hyper-violent satire masquerading as an action film. And despite spawning two sequels, a television series, some anime, and now a remake, the film's success was inimitable. This is partly because RoboCop only…

History If you went on one of Diamond’s tours , which ran between 1982 and 2010, you could see why the FDNY was concerned. He’d lug three plastic orange barricades out to the middle of Atlantic Avenue, pry off the manhole cover with a crowbar, and steady a thin ladder into the narrow shaft, the only…

I t’s the day before a foul tip off the bat of Rajai Davis will fracture Francisco Cervelli’s hand, and the Yankees’ still-intact starting catcher is in excellent spirits. After spending almost all of 2012 in the minors, he’s happy to be back in the Yankees clubhouse. He’s also happy to be off to a…

"People prefer imperfect things," the creator of the incredibly popular, loved, hated and now-notorious Flappy Bird , Dong Nguyen, mused over Twitter last March, long before most anyone had ever heard of him or played his game. He was stating why he thought he'd be okay launching a video game that…

Illustration by SHOUT In 2008, air courier DHL left Wilmington, Ohio, sending the small city into a tailspin and transforming it overnight into a poster child of the Great Recession. But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: The citizens refused to let their lovely town wither…

But why that McDonald’s? The kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute dining limit. The news made headlines as far…