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Hideo Kojima at his headquarters in Tokyo. Credit... Keizo Kitajima for The New York Times Skip to contentSkip to site index The Great Read Feature He’s an auteur whose bizarre creations — the Metal Gear Solid series and, most recently, Death Stranding — have become huge blockbusters. Why do gamers…
Photo by Blake Andrews John Sypal is a photographer based in Tokyo • Blake: Here’s something I’ve been wondering about lately. I’ve been using flash a lot over the past year or so, and I’ve noticed I’m usually the only one out there doing this. I think what's happened is that the iPhone wave has…
Michael Jang Michael Jang: Self-Portrait, Financial District, San Francisco , 1973 For most of the twentieth century, the day-to-day lives of Asian Americans were barely depicted in mainstream art and media. While European immigrant groups like Italian Americans assimilated to become white—shaping…
1 Introduction When confronted by a piece of art, viewers often entertain rich, surprising and complex thoughts, and this interpretive process occurs across otherwise very different prompting phenomena. Moreover, viewers often interpret artworks in ways that go well beyond how they would interpret…
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teen-ager, Laura Delano was prescribed nineteen medications in fourteen years. Photograph by Levi Mandel for The New Yorker; original image by Bachrach Photography Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her…
Concept art from Anthem Image: Ben McGrath ( ArtStation ) It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem . Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond . They’d even…
Recently, I spent the entirety of my weekly therapy session just trying to get to therapy. There’s never a good time to leave your desk when you work in media, but on this particular Thursday, I’d been running late to my shrink’s office in the West Village after helping a writer navigate a tricky…
Illustration by Armando Veve Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Even though the persecution of Viennese Jews had begun immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in Vienna for CBS radio when…
Remember Destiny , Bungie's ambitious, but ultimately-too-flawed-to-live, MMORPG/Shooter/Peter-Dinklage-tormenter? No? I don't blame you. It came out in 2014, riding the most hype any one thing can have without Flavor Flav screaming in the sidecar. It was a resounding disappointment. Rightly derided…
Contents Good parties diverge widely; all bad parties are bad in the same way. I am trapped at a dull dinner following a dull talk: part of a series of dinners and talks that grad students organise, unpaid (though at considerable expense to themselves—experience! exposure!), to provide free content…
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. An Italian newspaper, reporting on Donald Trump retweeting himself depicted as Pepe the Frog in September of 2016. 1. Born from Something Awful A round 2005 or…
In February of 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned space probe Voyager 1 around to take a photograph of the Earth from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. Meditating on this image, Sagan later suggested that , having now been confronted with our own cosmic insignificance, it was…
T he first thing you notice at Donald Trump's rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd. Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such problems. Illustration by Robert Grossman At the Verizon…
The Star Wars prequel trilogy is nearly brilliant. It took me 10 years to realise it, but it’s true. You see, the other night, my girlfriend and I drank a bottle of wine and started – as is entirely understandable – ripping into Episodes I to III . We hit the usual, obvious punching bags – Jar Jar,…
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a…
We've seen a lot of aesthetic trends in the games industry that ape older graphical styles, from cel shading to the retro 8-bit look. The next one could well be the most surprising: a lo-res monochromatic black and white, with only patterns of differently-spaced dots to create the illusion of…
Illustration by Richard Wilkinson. B y the late fourth century CE the river Danube had become Rome’s Calais. What we often call the “invasions” into the Roman empire of barbarian hordes (or “swarms”, perhaps) could equally well be described as mass movements of economic migrants or political…
Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal photos, signs, people and lights in self-driving cars, crops, forests and traffic in aerial imagery, various anomalies in medical images and all kinds of other useful things. But once in a while these…
Devin Washburn To obtain a hard copy of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), the most popular personality test in the world, one must first spend $1,695 on a week-long certification program run by the Myers & Briggs Foundation of Gainesville, Florida. This year alone, there have been close to…
In 1976, Donald Warren—a sociologist from Oakland University in Michigan who would die two decades later without ever attaining the rank of full professor—published a book called The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. Few people have read or heard…
In 2006, i was 50 —and I was falling apart. Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew…
My brain tumor introduced itself to me on a grainy MRI, in the summer of 2009, when I was 28 years old. It had been with me from the day I was born. Tumors like mine develop in utero. They are usually discovered in children, but no one could tell me why mine had only been found once I was an adult.…
The importance of Donald Trump Far from destroying our democracy, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process. Photo-illustration by Bobby Doherty. Trump photograph by Michele Asselin/Contour by Getty Images; Wig Styling by Sharelle…
In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deep into the 21st century. After six years of silent, sometimes secret…
I've been thinking lately about music covers , and how they might or might not relate to photography. In music the idea of covering someone else's song isn't just acceptable. It's expected. Young musicians cut their teeth on covers, as many begin in cover bands trying out the songs of predecessors.…
Stop by for a personality test and just a little indoctrination. (Photo: Tupungato/Shutterstock) In 1923, an aspiring novelist named Katharine Cook Briggs read the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s treatise on . In this work — which Jung undertook, in part, to understand the reasons for his falling out with…
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of ideas in graduate-level theoretical physics. But I’ll try to make this introduction in the gentlest and most palatable way I can think of:…
A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died. Credit Photograph from Rolls Press / Popperfoto via Getty I—A Noiseless Flash At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when…
As romance gets swiped from the screen, some twentysomethings aren’t liking what they see. Photographs by Justin Bishop It’s a balmy night in Manhattan’s financial district, and at a sports bar called Stout, everyone is Tindering. The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing…
This inquiry into a presidential candidate with no chance of winning begins with an admittedly insulting premise: that its subject, who has technically laid out his reasons for seeking the White House, is running for reasons unknown. But I’m not alone in being baffled by the…
WIRED Logo SCROLL DOWN Nick Ballon for WIRED A military helicopter was on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men…
A dead ant infected with O. unilateralis fungus—it me. (via Wikimedia Commons) At the end of 2012, at the age of 32, I told my husband I was leaving. I packed my dog and a station wagon’s worth of things and my parents came and picked me up from Maryland and drove me to New York. For two weeks,…
A true crime tale of comic books, corruption, and a $9 million vanishing act Y ou don’t see an All Star Comics #3 every day. Published in 1940, it’s a milestone in what’s known as the Golden Age of comic books: the debut of the first bonafide superhero team, the Justice Society of America. There’s…
Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about…
My wife and I had always dreamed of living in Italy. Six years ago we finally made the move with our two young children. We rented a fourteenth-century farmhouse surrounded by olive groves and vineyards in the enchanting hills south of Florence. There were two famous landmarks near us: the villa La…
Jan Nikita / Wikimedia In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain . In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower , and a microscope a small-watcher . In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder . These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we…
The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Credit Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Map by Ziggymaj / Getty When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles…
“Never mind the mess/we’re going to Mars next.” – B. Dolan The vast expanses of space, the fate of humans in a dystopian world, the ramifications of technology, the limits of the human body, the people trying to break them. These are the bread and butter of science fiction. But as much as people…
I n 1900, Sigmund Freud, a Viennese specialist in nervous disorders, began treating the 18-year-old daughter of a rich acquaintance. Freud, who was 44, was just beginning to practice psychoanalysis, a form of therapy that would become known as ‘the talking cure.’ The girl, whom Freud would later…
Two weeks ago in my post Pachter’s P-value Prize I offered for justifying a reasonable null model and a p-value ( p) associated to the statement “” Strikingly, 95% of cases of accelerated evolution involve only one member of a gene pair, providing strong support for a specific model of evolution,…
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