Zak Kaczmarek/Getty Images 1. She is fighting the pernicious idea that older women don’t matter. “People say I’m controversial,” Madonna told an audience of music-industry peers in 2016. “But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.” Sexism was the demon that haunted…

Nicolas Cage in Con Air: is there another actor anywhere in the world as original and distinctive?Photograph: Allstar/TOUCHSTONE W hat kind of masochists would attend an all-night Nicolas Cage movie marathon? What kind of sadists would program seven of his films in a row? If one wants to observe the…

THE FIGHTERS Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq By C. J. Chivers 374 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28. C. J. Chivers , a senior writer for The New York Times and a former Marine infantry officer, begins his new book with a description of an American weapon, equipped with GPS sensors and a guidance…

Have you ever been the victim of a con? I have. It happened when I was in college, traveling around Turkey with a friend. We were approached one night in Istanbul by a chatty young man who spoke good English. He was headed to a nightclub to meet some people. Would we like to join him? When we…

Buhler’s mayor, Daniel Friesen, understands why dying towns welcomed Dollar General out of desperation.Photograph: Kacy Meinecke for the Guardian W hen Dollar General came to Haven, Kansas, it arrived making demands. The fastest growing retailer in America wanted the taxpayers of the small,…

As a science writer at The New Yorker , Maria Konnikova, 34, focuses on the brain, and the weird and interesting ways people use their brains. Dr. Konnikova is an experimental psychologist trained at Columbia University. But her latest experiment is on herself. For a book she’s researching on luck…

The second stage of the Nintendo Entertainment System's long lifespan started in earnest on April 3, 1997. By that time, Nintendo had already moved on to 3D gaming with Super Mario 64. But an army of game fans, largely teens and college students who had been young children when the NES first came…

Though we rarely give them much thought, batteries — specifically lithium-ion batteries — enable modern life. They run our smartphones, yes, but they also power our Bluetooth speakers, toothbrushes, satellites, and pacemakers. In Australia, a partnership with Tesla will equip 50,000 homes with solar…

Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes, there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it…

Miodrag Kovačević, a 32-year-old game developer from Serbia who currently works on big budget video games, didn't grow up with a lot of money. Importing consoles to Serbia was expensive, so only people who were well off had them. He played many Super Nintendo games at friends' houses or at…

Illustration by Ben Wiseman. In the heart of San Francisco, the gig economy reigns supreme. Walk intoa grocery store, and a large number of shoppers you see are independentcontractors for grocery-delivery start-up Instacart. Step outside, andcars with black-and-white Uber stickers or flashing Lyft…

Investors are fretting about emerging markets again. Turkey is the front-burner concern at the moment, but what really is getting people’s attention is the prospect that the financial problems there could spread to other fast-growing but risky countries. If history is any indication, that has the…

By • August 6th, 2018 Sponsored Looped time has been present within video games since their inception, with game over screens and new game plus mechanics acting as disjunctive events that allow for the gamespace to be reset. Most recently this has been experimented with through the use of cyclical…

Turkey's central bank has said it is ready to take "all necessary measures" to ensure financial stability after the collapse of the lira. It has vowed to provide banks with "all the liquidity the banks need". The comments came after a widening diplomatic spat with the US prompted market turmoil in…

Lee’s point is clear: the radical racist right was, forty years ago, on the ropes, and it was allowed to come back stronger than ever. Photograph by David Lee / Focus Features / Everett Spike Lee’s new film, “ BlacKkKlansman ,” is, in its contours, a police procedural drama. It is set in the early…

For the last seven years, Tim Lee has been warning that a financial crisis in Turkey would set off a wider calamity in global markets. Just about nobody listened — until now. A plunge in the Turkish lira and the prospect that the country might soon need a bailout has spurred an investor exodus in…

Baron Cohen’s new characters are all straight white men—he knows that cross-identity disguises will no longer fly. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn Before screening Sacha Baron Cohen’s “ Who Is America? ,” Showtime flacks handed me a nondisclosure agreement. They locked up my phone. Guards roamed…

John David Washington and Adam Driver infiltrate the Klan in Spike Lee’s film. Illustration by Keith Negley At the end of “Malcolm X,” Spike Lee’s formidable bio-pic of 1992, we see a bunch of schoolkids, standing up in turn to announce, “I’m Malcolm X.” Thus is the hero of the film, played with…

A year and a half ago, Chloë Grace Moretz — a preternaturally confident child star who by 19 had more than 50 credits on her résumé, including “Kick-Ass,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and “Clouds of Sils Maria” — hit pause. “I had taken a little break to figure out exactly what project I wanted to do next…

Nicolas Ortega I found my way to the Download Your Information tool in late March, soon after a whistle-blower revealed that the political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered information about tens of millions of Facebook users. The tool, which Mark Zuckerberg referenced several times…

Sean Spicer is currently cashing in on his role as the guy who once lied on Donald Trump’s behalf every day by publishing a book. The former White House press secretary is doing a big publicity tour to promote it, so the team over at Full Frontal decided to have a little fun with that. Last night’s…

Amazon says it has to crack down on people who abuse its services to protect its more than 300 million customers. Above, an Amazon warehouse in Germany. Photo: Uli Deck/DPA/Zuma Press Even Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.64% has its limits. The e-commerce giant bans shoppers from the site for infractions…

O ne of the most persistent myths in design is that “the best designs are invisible.” There have even been books written about how to make your design more invisible, claiming the best User Interface (UI) is no UI . All of these books seem to spring from the Don’t Make Me Think school, where…

They have a surprisingly decent graphics department over in Crazyland. Photo: Anonymous A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by…

In the new millennium, science fiction films continue to flourish, commanding massive box office receipts, inspiring our dreams, and all while making technological innovations along the way. Franchises remain popular, and so many of the big event films have SF underpinnings, but so too, do creative…

Harrison Ford on a payphone in a scene from the 1993 film The Fugitive Warner Bros. / Getty Images This movie was not supposed to be good. Here’s the plot: A middle-aged cardiovascular surgeon’s wife is killed by a one-armed man, and said surgeon is sent to death row. But his bus crashes on the way…

It’s a picture-perfect day on Martha’s Vineyard. Families stream by on a heavily foot-trafficked thoroughfare, while white men in cargo shorts dock their boats and crack open their beers. In the middle of it all is Spike Lee, sitting on a bench, delivering an earful of Saturday-afternoon real talk.…

Lexi Alexander is easy enough to spot on a set: She’s the one in the middle of the huddle, surrounded on all sides by men—cameramen, stuntmen, sound guys, lighting guys, even a Guy Holding a Fake But Very Real-Looking Gun—and throwing punches around. Alexander is a film and television director, and…

BURBANK, Calif. — Everything ends, even if it might not feel that way right now for Joe and Anthony Russo. More than a year into the making of “Avengers: Infinity War,” these directing brothers were shuttling around the Walt Disney Studios here one evening in March, putting the finishing touches on…

Trace Lysette and Jamie Clayton, two of the most high profile transgender actresses working today, took to Twitter in the aftermath of Scarlett Johansson being cast in a transgender role to slam Hollywood for continuing to allow cisgender actors the chance to play transgender characters. Johansson…

‘Naively adolescent’ … Linda Lawson and Dennis Hopper in the 1961 film Night Tide – streaming soon at byNWR.com.Photograph: Ronald Grand Archive T his is a frightening time to be alive. For the past six months, I’ve been shooting in America, and it seems increasingly clear we’re now living in a…

SAN FRANCISCO — Souvla , a Greek restaurant with a devoted following, serves spit-fired meat two ways: in a photogenic sandwich, or on a photogenic salad, either available with a glass of Greek wine. The garnishes are thoughtful: pea shoots, harissa-spiked yogurt, mizithra cheese. The small menu is…

Kamasi Washington, the wisest man on Earth The O.G. saxophonist made his name in jazz, but he’s bigger than genre. Fashion by Tiffany Wright of Alice and Louie Photographer Chantal Anderson Buy a copy of The FADER's Summer Issue. ADVERTISEMENT Shortly before getting on the phone with the effusive…

In scrambling to ramp up production of its Model 3 electric car, Tesla has run into trouble with robots and automated machinery, a need for more workers and a shortage of battery packs. Now Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, suspects his company might have a more unusual problem: sabotage. In an…

A merican music is black music — and vice versa. We can’t begin to comprehend the complexity of the American musical tradition, at least within the past 125 years, without breaking down the contributions of black musicians. Music is born through a ripple effect, a call-and-response method of…

The New York State attorney general’s office filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign.…

Might be a new direction in information warfare Three months after being indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice, the notorious Russian troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) has launched a new media venture targeting Americans. This time, however, there’s reason to believe the…

What do you remember about Lily Allen’s 2014 record Sheezus ? Maybe you remember the well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous rollout of lead single “Hard Out Here”, an early example of internet callout culture (rightfully) criticised for using black women as props . Or the strange, watered down…

The company behind tiny food delivery robots has admitted that people are kicking its machines — and it's an early insight into how cruel humans could be to robots. Starship Technologies was launched in 2014 by Skype cofounders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. It makes 22-inch tall robots that roll…