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Photo: Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty This piece was originally published on January 27, 2013. Steven Soderbergh has directed 26 films since his 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape — the behind-closed-doors portrait of yuppie Louisiana often credited with kick-starting the indie-film revolution of…

INT. A HOUSE IN THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS—NIGHT It’s quiet at this long, low ranch house up in Benedict Canyon even though it’s Saturday night. The year is 1974, and the decor reflects the era’s aesthetic: zebra rug, mod wallpaper and suede sofas facing a mirrored bar. This is a modern bachelor pad, a…

Youth Gone Wild The arcade has always been aligned with the coin-operated amusements industry, and — since the birth of pinball — with youth. By definition, an "amusement arcade" is a place that houses coin-operated machines, and for the first half of the 20th century, that meant pinball. The first…

The adult tapeworm has no knowledge of what happens to its egg sacs after they detach; nor does it know where it came from. It simply finds itself attached to a warm, pulsing wall, surrounded by a rich nutrient flow. Its experience of the human being is limited to this: that the human surrounds it…

1. DID YOU KNOW THAT THE PLACEMENT OF A CAMERA IN A FILM HAS A DIRECT EFFECT ON YOU AS A VIEWER? FOR SOME OF YOU, OF COURSE YOU KNOW THAT. FOR OTHERS, MAYBE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT. MAYBE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND JUST HOW MUCH A CERTAIN ANGLE AND WHAT IS PRECISELY SHOWN IN IT CONVEYS NOT JUST A VERY…

First thing in the morning, the king of Hollywood receives a phone call. The call always comes from New York. The reason is simple. New York, being three hours ahead of Los Angeles, always has The Numbers. And The Numbers—daily accountings of every dollar spent, every box-office receipt—are all that…

Chief Keef's "Finally Rich": Reviews Spark Debate About Race And Music Criticism: http://t.co/ukD870hh -- well said @davebry9

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Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard's Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you'll give it a look. The tech industry and its press have treated…

“Good design makes a product understandable” – Dieter Rams Good navigation should do at least three things well: (1) it should allow the user to navigate; (2) it should serve as wayfinding, letting the user know where they are; and (3) it should help the user understand what the product is capable…

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell ( Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil ). The Obama campaign's technologists were tense…

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"Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?" The blockbuster in the age of 'corporate irony': http://t.co/Vko23puR (by David Denby, @TNR)

Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label.…

To this end, I would like to come to an agreement with you. Let’s agree to small set of rules that we’ll follow when we mail each other, ok? An Email Contract Before we start, there are two kinds of email: original content and follow-on content. Original content, an email that is the first mail in…

"Louis C.K. and the Rise of the 'Laptop Loners'" http://t.co/Upb1lA1e

Over the summer I chatted to Gilles Peterson for the " Mala in Cuba " sleeve notes... Blackdown: Hey Gilles, great to chat to you. So first of all, I’d love to know, really, about the beginning of this project. I didn’t raise it with Mala, I didn’t know whether it was appropriate or not but the…

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. ~Mark Twain Not too long ago, dailycred posted a little research about using Facebook and Twitter as signup mechanisms – Surprise! People hate being forced to use Facebook . I came across the post via HackerNews . In summary, dailycred…

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway…

Designer Matt Steel of @Metagramme "repents" on the print-centric approach to iPad magazine apps. http://t.co/yGLnZS5g

Sorry to break it to you, but... "The internet IS real life." http://t.co/wa8EdUFR @dailydoseofjess / @STWnextness on point as always

I recently gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival , a full-day event held on Saturday, May 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I teach a course in Content…

August 3, 2012 To remember him as we met him, twenty years ago, is to know everything that was lost, everything that never happened to a boy who could surprise you with his charm and wit and heart. At fifteen, he was selling drugs on the corners of Fayette Street, but that doesn’t begin to explain…

◌ Think about Facebook: An angry reverie on software 26 May 2010 [Note on 5 March 2012: Today this has been making the rounds on Twitter among some of the readers and writers I most admire. I’m happy. I’m also terribly self-conscious, because this was sneezed out over a few evenings two years ago in…

fresh signals categorical archives Stuff About Stanley Kubrick Grab our blended RSS feed here. "It's quite interesting to see the back and forth between two creative geniuses like Stanley Kubrick and Saul Bass working on the movie poster of The Shining. jc-09.09.16 SK's top ten films. The Bank Dick!…

Anatomy of a trend: In wake of gory incidents, 'zombie apocalypse' talk flourishes online: http://t.co/lAQ8EcsS -CJ

We speak with the men and women who made one of the best TV shows of all time. Photos Courtesy of HBO | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2012 Ten years ago this month, The Wire premiered on HBO and… almost nobody cared. The Baltimore saga of cops and dealers, junkies and politicians, poverty and hope,…

Zwibbler.com is a drop-in solution that lets users draw on your web site. A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with…

TV The Men Behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable The creators of Mad Men , Breaking Bad , and Deadwood are this generation's auteurs. Brett Martin sits them down to discuss the future of television In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king—none more so than those emperors of the air that control…

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It's no understatement to say that Alien 3 was poorly received on its theatrical release and, with 20 years hindsight, it's not difficult to see why. Alien , released in 1979 and famously directed by Ridley Scott, changed the landscape for hard science fiction movies. Scott would further redefine…

For publishers whose businesses evolved during the long day of print newspapers and magazines, the expansion of the Internet was tremendously disorienting. The Internet taught readers they might read stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more efficient ways to…

Christopher Nolan is interested in how the mind processes and flees from reality. Instead of coming to terms with an actual occurrence or historical events, his protagonists have consistently sacrificed the base groundwork of a factual universe for a more meaningful symbolism that communicates a…

@joemuggs 's bluffers guide to Smith & Mighty is essential. Always been a huge RSD fan but clearly I need to go deeper. http://t.co/O6Q1I61V

Great CSS Trick - Adjusting Text Underlines from @Artsy Engineering. This was driving me crazy. http://t.co/dMbuJA2A

Ampoule is reading: David Simon | Welcome to Florida. Beware of gunmen standing their ground: http://t.co/LljNGVim

Jostling amidst a scrum of a dozen or so fellow mic men, the rapper finally extracts himself from the dense hoods up, such that he can face the camera. Lolling from side to side nonchalantly, with the look of someone who knows he’s the centre of the ends’ attention but is trying hard not to let on,…

Recently, Aaron Sorkin got a note from HBO entertainment president Sue Naegle about a passage he’d written in a script for his new series, The Newsroom, a workplace dramedy set at a fictional cable-news show and premiering on the network in June. The comment, which was not approving, got his…

Iannucci, in Trafalgar Square, London. “Veep,” a satirical sitcom about American politics, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and is written wholly by British men. Credit Photograph by Peter Dench / Reportage by Getty Armando Iannucci, the British comedy writer and director, is short and slight, and, at…