Photo: Maya Robinson/Vulture When Todd Haynes was working on Safe , the 1995 film starring Julianne Moore as a housewife who becomes increasingly allergic to the world around her, he expressed frustration over the classification of “gay cinema.” It wasn’t that he felt the category was pigeonholing,…

President Trump has personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages, according to three people familiar with their conversations, a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of…

Well, it’s been fun. Craig Barritt/Getty Images Enjoy your MoviePass membership while it lasts, because right now, things are looking financially dire for the service. On Tuesday , parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics reported that it had just $15.5 million worth of cash in the bank at the…

Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in…

I’ve got a great idea for a start-up. Want to hear the pitch? It’s called the 75 Cent Dollar Store. We’re going to sell dollar bills for 75 cents — no service charges, no hidden fees, just crisp $1 bills for the price of three quarters. It’ll be huge. You’re probably thinking: Wait, won’t your store…

A hacker has broken into the servers of Securus, a company that allows law enforcement to easily track nearly any phone across the country, and which a US Senator has exhorted federal authorities to investigate . The hacker has provided some of the stolen data to Motherboard, including usernames and…

Bitcoin's burgeoning electricity demands have attracted almost as much attention as the cryptocurrency's wildly fluctuating value. But estimating exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses, necessary for understanding its impact and implementing policy, remains a challenge. In the first…

How Roger Ailes & Fox News Got Rich Scamming America’s La Z Boy Cowboys and Selling Out America’s Soul Note: Because of the 120,000 Hits on this article and many requests to “tell the whole story in a book” I have launched a crowdfunding book pre-sale site for the complete book. IF you hate Fox…

Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images The following essay is entitled “Stasis” and was written by actress Ally Sheedy. It is an excerpt from the new collection Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay. The book is out now. I was eighteen years old when I went to Hollywood to begin my…

‘There are millions of gamers out there with a wide variety of disabilities’ … Microsoft’s Xbox adaptive controller Microsoft is launching a new Xbox controller, developed to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Set for release later this year, the Xbox adaptive controller is a customisable…

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash A few years ago I came across the concept of online freelancing… And after looking into it for a little bit, my mind was honestly blown. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this before, and I liked everything it had to offer… But one thing that continued to…

The debate continues over how to make New York City’s streets less crowded, safer and better for people as well as cars. Some, like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, call for congestion pricing in Manhattan, although so far the New York State Legislature has not allowed that. Mayor Bill de Blasio and groups such…

Since the beginning of April, Sokpop has released three games and a photo editor for your phone. In the same time frame, I have released no games and maybe done my laundry twice. Sokpop’s productivity is awe-inspiring. Sokpop’s swamp exploration game, moeras Sokpop is a Netherlands-based indie…

Or, How to Think About the Next Decade It strikes me these days, as it probably strikes you, that the world is going a little crazy, losing its bearings. It struck me recently, along those lines, that “insane” is, funnily, a near perfect acronym for the links in the causal chain, the vicious cycle,…

On Monday night, Sotheby’s will sell Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), which the auction house describes as “the greatest work from the iconic series in which Amedeo Modigliani reinvented the nude for the Modern era.” Estimated at $150 million, it is the most expensive auction estimate ever .…

Poppy (center) and Mars Argo (right) Ross Miller/Polygon Can a living art project be found guilty of identity theft? That’s the question posed in the case of Mars Argo (Brittany Sheets), the singer-turned-YouTuber-turned-actress who is suing her former boyfriend and band partner Titanic Sinclair…

The House That Jack Built Photo: Cannes Film Festival There would be no press conference. That much was agreed upon in advance, probably by all parties involved. After all, the last time Lars von Trier sat down for a little Q&A at Cannes—this was back in 2011, to talk about Melancholia —he ended up…

Photo: Mark Wilson (Getty) It’s been nearly three months since many Google employees—and the public—learned about the company’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by…

What makes the police encounters chilling is how routine they are . They’re sparked by black people going about their everyday lives, only to be interrupted by someone calling the police for the thinnest of suspicions. In the past month, more than a handful of such interactions have attracted…

(CNN) On Wednesday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a slew of transcripts related to its investigation of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between the top brass of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and several Russians, including Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer. The…

Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Hey, buddy, So great to hear from you. It’s a bummer that we’ll miss you while you’re in town. We’re sneaking away for a little babymoon before Keithlyn arrives. It sounds corny, but we seriously need it. (What do you think of Keithlyn as a unisex baby name, by the…

Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves. After all, computers can run tons of simulations and figure out the…

Mahmoud M’seddi at his bakery, which he calls a “laboratory,” in Paris. He is the latest child of immigrants to excel at keeping the French baguette tradition alive. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times PARIS — Beware that basket of limp crust put in front of you. Not all French bread is created…

Maybe it was the slides . Maybe it was the MAGA . Maybe it was the impressively horrible take on American slavery. Maybe the event just wasn’t well publicised. All we know is that for whatever reason, so few people showed up to a Yeezy launch in Sydney, Australia, that the event was shut down in…

The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored. I didn’t really feel like doing work, but I felt some distant compulsion to sit at my computer in a kind of work-simulacrum, so that at least at the end of the day I would…

As anyone who has fumbled through a sexual encounter knows, real-life sex can be far more complicated than a poster declaring, “ Consent is Sexy .” Many remain confused about what constitutes sexual consent, and talking about it in the moment can feel awkward. On college campuses, a combination of…

I’m about to go speak to NAMI Ohio’s statewide conference, Fulfilling the Promise. These are the remarks I prepared for my speech. Before I begin, I want to warn you that this talk touches on many triggering subjects, including self-harm and suicide. I also want you to know that I’m speaking from my…

Ross Miller / Polygon YouTube was born more than a decade ago with the intention to give a growing online audience a seamless interface in which to upload video — a catch-all that would be defined a few years later by limitless possibilities and star-making qualities. In 2017, Google’s reported…

A scene from Neil Breen’s Fateful Findings / Youtube There’s nothing good about the misogyny of bad movies and their most devoted fans. B ad-movie fans always remember the first cinematic travesty that made them love bad movies. For me? That movie was Squirm . Schlocky, horrendously acted,…

Getty Images/Ringer illustration Kanye West and Donald Glover have fallen into an odd, indirect conversation with one another throughout Kanye’s ongoing reputational collapse. Their interactions have inspired some popular discussion of whether Glover might be regarded as West’s rightful successor,…

President Trump displays his signed memorandum that reinstates sanctions on Iran. (Chip Somodevilla) In retrospect, the era of American hegemony — the moment of the “sole superpower,” when the United States was the “essential” country — was remarkably brief. It began in 1991, with the collapse of…

Columbus Nova has access to billions of dollars, with no need for new capital. So why did the firm hire Michael Cohen as a business consultant for a half million dollars? Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty After the news came out, on Tuesday, that Columbus Nova, an American company linked to the…

Paul Simon felt grateful. It was March 2001, and the occasion was the 16th-annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan. Along with another honoree that night, Michael Jackson, Simon joined an elite group of artists that has been inducted…

Robert Daly / Caiaimage / Getty Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, made a remarkable announcement during a keynote at the company’s big conference this week: “The increase in the Stories format,” he explained, “is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their…

On Easter Sunday, as children hunted for brightly colored eggs, adults crowded into stately churches, and 20-somethings celebrated yet another excuse to brunch, I nestled into a large beige recliner at the Studio Movie Grill in Marietta, Georgia. I’d made a 30-minute trip through Atlanta traffic to…

YouTube/Ringer illustration Donald Glover kicked off his Saturday Night Live monologue this past weekend with a joke, a restated grudge, and a multistage introduction that all evoked peak—and also valley —Kanye West. The joke: “I used to live in New York, and it’s so great to be back here,…

Electronic Arts Here’s the story of the unlikely people who made Vol. 2 —and why nothing has come close since. It’s been a decade and a half since Electronic Arts released NBA Street Vol. 2 , the last truly great basketball video game. Even 15 years later, the game’s sense of style and spirit (and…