Love and Loot in the Andes Roy Petersen pops the cap off a Leo , one of Thailand’s cheapest beers. It’s getting dark out, and the lizards are laughing, a sort of rhythmic chuckle emanating from the jungle that surrounds his single-story concrete house near the Burmese border. Maps with elaborate…

Whether or not you consider games to be works of art, you have to admit, the games industry and the art world are currently two very separate places. Games and art are sold in different marketplaces, covered by different press outlets, discussed in different forums, and taught in different academic…

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his…

In February, 1891, the first few advertisements started appearing in papers: “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board,” boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions “about the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy” and promised “never-failing…

Jason Fagone | Ingenious, Crown Publishing Group | November 2013 | 20 minutes (4,972 words) Below is the first chapter from Jason Fagone ’s book, Ingenious , about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone…

John Sayles, age 63, is one of the founding fathers of modern American independent cinema. One of the many now-famous directors to start his career working with Roger Corman, he’s spent 25 years writing and directing unusually humanistic, low-key films about how people relate to each other, through…

The Witcher 3 comes out on Tuesday, 19th May, and so we've hauled an exciting Witcher-related article out of the Eurogamer archive for you to read again or enjoy for the first time if you missed it. Here, Robert Purchese reveals the story of Witcher developer CD Projekt in an article first published…

As told to Sheila Heti. I grew up in Montreal and went to an upper-middle-class Jewish day school where kids had parents who maybe owned a carpet store or maybe were dentists. And then I went to Harvard for college. And it was pretty weird. When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would…

Best known for tingly soaps with wacky labels, the company has become one of the biggest players in the battle over labeling genetically modified ingredients. Yes on 522 logos on Dr. Bronner's soap bottles: "Totally unprecedented in the world of product labeling." Dave Gilson It's midmorning at the…

This is a slightly updated version of the article that appeared in the June issue of PDN with the title “Film Frenzy.” When Eastman Kodak Company announced the discontinuation of its line of professional color reversal films on March 1 it was the latest disappointment in a months-long string of…

After 46 years of operation, Bloomington's Waffle House will close and be replaced by a luxury apartment building. The demolition of the restaurant building are scheduled for Sept. 16. Anna Teeter Buy Photos On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before…

A couple weeks ago, I asked you to tell us about the worst fucking boss you've ever had and almost every single response could easily be included in the MOST TERRIBLE GARBAGE PEOPLE ALIVE. This is not good, bosses of the world. Not good at all. Tell Us About the Worst Fucking Boss You've Ever Had…

There’s a lot you can do for your child with 99 dollars. You can purchase 14 gallons of organic milk or 396 lollipops. You can give her 33 rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, or you can get him a couple of violin lessons. You could put the money in a savings account, you could buy her her…

I. Unfairness Consider David . The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath. Armed with only a slender staff and a slingshot, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in a brass helmet and chain mail, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a staff “like…

This dog was treated by a vet, but many were put down at the outbreak of WWII At the beginning of World War II, a government pamphlet led to a massive cull of British pets. As many as 750,000 British pets were killed in just one week. This little-discussed moment of panic is explored in a new book.…

A sample of the good available through Silk Road. “I wouldn't mind if he was executed” While this was going on, the FBI was tearing into the mirrored server, where it found all sorts of incriminating information. For one thing, the server had been set up to accept encrypted SSH logins, and the…

It may seem ghoulish to the outsider. It will seem essential to the gamer. One of the most popular things to do in video games is to aim for the head with a gun and fire. Who thought of that? And why do people like doing it so much? Why Headshots Make Some People Happy Let's go with the pleasure…

The trend this year in video games, only about a decade late, is to let players repel an attack on New York City. See Crysis 2 this spring, Modern Warfare 3 this fall, and other games that put a virtual gun in their player's hands and some fantastic evil in their sights. The enemy isn't explicitly…

Picture this Everpix began as the brainchild of Latour, a 34-year-old French entrepreneur who sold his first company to Apple in 2003. That company, PixelShox Studio, made motion-graphics software that was later renamed Quartz Composer. It became a key part of OS X, powering the operating system's…

Arnold Schwarzenegger has built his career on negating suspension of disbelief. He plays characters with comically Anglo names like Ben Richards and Howard Langston, despite looking and sounding exactly like an Austrian ex-bodybuilder. He’s good at squinting, smirking, and standing up while keeping…

Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level. Those people who really…

Was the iron in the last hotel room you stayed in made in China? Bad news: it may have been hiding an insidious little chip designed to infect your computer with spam-serving malware . It’s not just irons that are being used as tiny trojan horses, either. Dashboard cameras, cell phones, and tea…

Let it be known that Hunter Moore sleeps well. He sleeps deeply, profoundly, and when he sleeps, he dreams wondrous and beautiful dreams in which, for instance, he finds himself in possession of a large fortune. (“I’ll find a treasure chest, and I’ll wake up like, ‘Oh my God, I have all this…

HTML5 Article experience by the HTML5 Hub and Intel Inside a darkened conference room in the Miami Beach Holiday Inn, America’s most badass hackers are going to war – working their laptops between swigs of Bawls energy drink as Bassnectar booms in the background. A black guy with a soul patch…

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who attended Harvard, returns to campus this weekend for a question-and-answer session as part of the launch of The Harvard Campaign . Below, author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a book about the great inventors of the digital age, recalls Gates’ formative years at…

M ovie houses are now so packed with presumptive Academy Award contenders that in a few weeks, when we’re facing Thor 2: Thor Harder and The Hunger Games: Jennifer Lawrence Is Still Contractually Bound To Do This , we may look back on October with nostalgic pining. Gravity is making serious money —…

A Game of Shark And Minnow By Jeff Himmelman Photographs and video by Ashley Gilbertson Produced by Mike Bostock , Clinton Cargill , Shan Carter , Nancy Donaldson , Tom Giratikanon , Xaquín G.V. , Steve Maing and Derek Watkins A yungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There’s…

The Internet has changed (and keeps changing) how we live today — how we find love, make money, communicate with and mislead one another. Writers in a variety of genres tell us what these new technologies mean for storytelling. MARGARET ATWOOD: Do new technologies change what plot devices are…

If David Tran were a more conventional CEO, he would be a fixture at conferences, a darling of magazine profiles, and a subject of case studies in the Harvard Business Review. Sriracha hot sauce, made by Huy Fong Foods, which Tran founded 33 years ago in Los Angeles, is one of the coolest brands in…

Some background: feminism (noun):the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men. feminist (noun): a person who supports feminism. And yet... They like men. Bust: Do you consider yourself a feminist? Bjork: Umm.. no. Bust: Why not? Bjork: Because I…

A hard sell to the executives It may be hard to imagine now, but Live was bigger than anything YouTube had ever attempted, and it was their first production with truly global ambitions. “There was a lot of ambivalence internally at the time about a big TV-like production,” says Mia Quagliarello,…

Illustration by Gary Taxali January 1st—Ha! That feels fun to write. I’m excited. I’ve been thinking about doing this for so long—I went through my notes and it turns out I came up with this idea all the way back on Day After Day After Very Cloudy Day. January 2nd—I’m still so excited about this…

James Deen won’t stop apologizing. From the moment he emerges from the garage of his sprawling, gray house and shakes my hand, he’s sorry. He’s sorry about the construction workers patching a hole in his roof. He’s sorry about the porn visible on his computer. He’s sorry about his television—he had…

For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers…