North Korea has arrived as a nuclear power, and there is no going back. Once the reality-show theatrics of the Singapore summit meeting subside, we are left with the reality that North Korea was just recognized as a de facto nuclear weapons power. President Trump went to the meeting with Kim Jong-un…

Illustration: Angelica Alzona Last December, a 22-year old modder who calls himself Ted52 purged the Steam forums for his Hearts of Iron IV mod, Millennium Dawn. Steam’s infrastructure made it difficult to remove unsavory threads individually, and he tells me he has more control of things over at…

Valve has stopped trying. Today’s blog post makes something explicit that many of us have seen for a while: The company doesn’t really care about the content on its platform. It doesn’t want to be put in the sticky situation of being responsible for the things being sold through Steam, so it won’t…

Rebekah Valentine Staff Writer Tuesday 5th June 2018 Share this article Recommend The challenges of independent development are real and numerous, but in the right circumstances those challenges can provide the perfect environment for creativity to blossom. That was the case for Minit, a game that…

In a 1970 TV commercial, a group of child actors portraying Louis Armstrong, Fiorello La Guardia, and Barney Pressman as kids are sitting on a New York City stoop and asking each other what they hope to be one day. Armstrong says he wants to be a musician. La Guardia says he wants to be mayor of New…

Glover takes an ambivalent view of his widespread acclaim. “People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, Oh, he thinks he’s the golden flower of the black community, thinks he’s so different,” he said. “But I am, though!” Photographs by Awol Erizku for The New Yorker Audio:…

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the…

MIAMI — Florida lawmakers gave final passage to a $400 million gun control and school safety bill on Wednesday in defiance of the National Rifle Association, which opposed the legislation’s firearm restrictions. The bipartisan vote came three weeks after a gunman killed 17 people in a rampage at…

The Afsluitdijk is a 20-mile dam that has been protecting the low-lying Netherlands from the force of the ocean for decades. According to Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist who works in urban environments, it’s quite famous in the country because “basically, it protects us from drowning.” Roosegaarde…

In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant. By Lauren Smiley Angel the concierge stands behind a lobby desk at a luxe apartment building in downtown San Francisco, and describes the residents of this imperial, 37-story tower.…

When I couldn’t buy a smart mirror and made one instead Sometime late last year I realized that I wanted my ordinary bathroom mirror to be more like the future we were promised in the movies . There doesn’t seem to be anyone selling the product I was looking for. The individual parts, however, were…

Earlier this year I wrote about the lack of nuance on our social media feeds and why so many people were trying to step away from it . And, taking my own good advice, I attempted to spend less time on my accounts. I used an app called Feedly to follow my favorite writers and publications via RSS…

Screenshot: NBC/Paramount Pictures, Graphic: Nicole Antonuccio. Welcome back to AVQ&A , where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to…

A slice of the data that Facebook keeps on the author: ‘This information has millions of nefarious uses.’Photograph: Dylan Curran W ant to freak yourself out? I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it. Google…

Some people are better at being themselves than others are. They're the ones at home instantly in any untried environment, the way a cloud looks just right no matter where it is in the sky. They seem to keep slightly better rhythm with the beat of the universe than other people—noticing things…

Daniel Pesina promoting Mortal Kombat competitor BloodStorm Scott Morrison/Incredible Technologies This story originally ran in 2012. We’re reposting it to coincide with Mortal Kombat 2’s 25th anniversary. This past school year, Columbia student Kenny Voong wanted to make a videogame. He just didn’t…

“Right, Who’s next.” Over the last few days, I’ve said this line to myself hundreds of times. I’ve scrolled through name after name, studied bios, examined photographs, and then I’ve put pen to paper and started drawing a seemingly endless stream of stick figures. But first, let’s briefly go back to…

“Just recently we passed $70 billion paid out to developers, 30% of that in the last year alone.” — Phil Schiller, Apple SVP @ WWDC 2017 It’s far easier than you think. No luck or perseverance necessary. At WWDC, Apple reported that they’ve paid out $70 billion to developers, with 30% of that ($21…

A group of Republican state legislators in South Carolina introduced a measure Thursday that would allow the state to secede from the United States if the federal government began to seize legally purchased firearms in the state. The bill , which was referred to the state House Judiciary Committee…

It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes (in glasses) was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot. Photograph from Universal Pictures / Everett Earlier this year, the Criterion Collection, which is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around…

“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say that we devise their misery. But they themselves — in their depravity — design grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.” ―Homer, The Odyssey I don’t have the group picture from the day my dad visited my fraternity house at Oklahoma State…

Photograph by Vladimir Weinstein / BFA / Shutterstock I have long maintained a theory that Anthony Bourdain —who died on Friday, at the age of sixty-one, of an apparent suicide—was the best-known celebrity in America. There are, I realize, actual ways to measure this sort of thing, but the intimacy…

There is a lot of conversation happening around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and using algorithms to shape the future of Design and the role of the designer. But how is that changing the way we work in the near future? “The end is near”, according to specialists in robotics and…

Getty Images The European Court of Justice has ruled that same-sex partners have residency rights The European Union's top court has ruled in favour of a Romanian gay man's right to have his US husband live with him in Romania. The country, which does not recognise same-sex marriage, had argued that…

Eric Thayer / Reuters The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in…

It is Monday evening, less than 24 hours after Stephen Paddock — an isolated, shadowy 64-year-old retired tax auditor and postal worker from Mesquite, Nevada, a high roller who liked to play video poker on the Las Vegas Strip — installed himself in a 32nd-floor corner suite at the Mandalay Bay…

Quantic Dream/Sony Interactive Entertainment Detroit: Become Human exemplifies the delicate, albeit not backhanded, praise of, “They mean well.” Perhaps director and lead writer David Cage, whose work at his studio Quantic Dream is best defined as “foreign-made, interactive interpretations of…

In August 2014, I was working as creative director of branded content at a large millennial-focused website that I had been a part of for more than three years. It was the kind of place where I could write anything—I had spent my first two years as a staff writer, which often meant writing four…

An Amazon ‘Alexa’ Echo Dot device Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo No matter how suspicious it has seemed that Amazon is encouraging us to put listening devices in every room of our homes, the company has always said that its Echo assistants are not listening in on or recording conversations. Over and…

Identity theft. Squatter’s rule. Price gouging. They’re not terms you’d normally associate with the friendly board game Monopoly. But that will change this June, when Monopoly Cheaters Edition goes on sale for $20–the result of two years of work by Hasbro to make a version of Monopoly that plays…

I tasted more than 40 individually wrapped bars, bought with cash from the noisy, off-key ice cream trucks that circle my block, as well as the bodegas in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I was looking for big, summery flavors; satisfying, nostalgic textures; and the kind of general resilience that is…

Photograph courtesy of Black Car News Above: Doug Schifter with his car. On a Monday morning in early February, Neil Weiss sat at his kitchen table in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, nursing a cup of coffee while checking messages on his iPad. A text had arrived at 5:25 a.m. “Making it count.” Weiss — the…

STOCKHOLM — “Sex must be voluntary — if it is not, then it is illegal.” This is the straightforward language of a new Swedish law set to change the way rape and other sexual crimes are prosecuted in the country. It is the first law in the country that acknowledges sex without explicit consent as…

Harvey Weinstein made no comment as he walked into a police station in New York Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has turned himself in to police in New York, where he is expected to face sexual misconduct charges. The charges have not been announced but US media say some may relate to accusations by…