More than 40 years ago this month, MAD Magazine founder William M. Gaines managed to outrage hundreds of his loyal readers, all by barely lifting a finger. For the April 1974 issue of his happily juvenile comedy rag—a mix of pop-culture parodies, political humor, and sound-effect-saturated comic strips—Gaines’ staff went with a cover illustration guaranteed […]
Though no one realized it at the time, the summer of 2003 was an apex moment for Z-grade cinema. That June, Tommy Wiseau released his crackpot rom-dram-com The Room in Los Angeles, giving viewers their first taste of the writer-director-star’s penchant for hammy performances and nonsensical non sequitors (“I did not hit her! Oh, hai, […]
Meeting a Monster is incredibly painful. It’s supposed to be. Created using audio recordings and re-enactments, the virtual reality experience recounts the story of Angela King, a woman who spent eight years in the white power movement and is now trying to confront the person she was—and is. It would be hard to watch at […]
After the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, I downloaded the audiobook version of No Time to Spare, one of the final tomes from the celebrated fantasy writer. It’s a clear-headed dialectic on getting old and getting on with it and I hoped, in choosing the audiobook, to hear Le Guin on the other side, […]
Click:fugitive emission gate valve I had a view, and my view was this: Serial sexual abusers should submit to castration. Castration, I believed, would sideline the abuser’s compulsions and thus keep the world safe from him (or her lol). While castration hasn’t been tested on abusers in the Harvey Weinstein style, it’s been used with […]
The premise of Westworld rests on an uneasy relationship between a town’s residents and the “newcomers”: wealthy, oblivious visitors, convinced that a new cowboy hat gives them permission to do whatever they like. In other words, there’s no better allegory for what happens to Austin during South By Southwest. Presumably to placate their Austinite hosts, […]
E3 is widely considered a conference for big games, and understandably so; the largest publishers in the industry dominate the event, debuting trailers and news for the most expensive and expansive videogames they could possibly produce. But it's not impossible to find compelling independent games at the show, either: here are our picks for five […]
For the past few years, reporting on far-right extremism and misinformation has been a messy free-for-all. Sure, there have been some attempts to delineate best practices, and certain approaches to storytelling, such as those that seem to normalize neo-Naziism, have come under harsh criticism. But few rules have guided the new genre of reporting—and, to […]
Hello, fellow teens! Sorry to interrupt your latest obsession. According to various news outlets, you're all busy setting up webcams, then holding a flaccid condom to your nostril and inhaling until it jellyfishes out of your nasopharynx and into the back of your throat like a latex loogie from hell. You've just completed the Condom […]
Brian Forde shouts over the din of the crowd packed inside a coworking space on a November evening in Irvine, California. “Hello! Hello! Hello! Thank you all so much for coming out,” he yells as he takes the stage. It’s been exactly one week since Democrats pulled off upset wins in states across the country […]