“I want you to know I understand,” says Cersei Lannister to her nemesis in the dungeons underneath King’s Landing. “I understand the fury that drives you.” It’s that old saw that every movie has parroted for as long as anyone can remember: We’re not so different, you and I. She, too, has been paraded through […]
When Final Fantasy XII first came out on the PlayStation 2, 11 years ago, no one knew what to do with it. Up until then, each game in the Japanese role-playing series had been like a reenactment of a ritual, one built and added to over years. The saga told personal, often melodramatic stories against […]
Does cosplay affect geopolitics? It does not. Does it drive the nation's economy? Not unless the United States' biggest global export happens to be glue guns or Lycra. What cosplay does do, though, is act as a barometer, a handy gauge displaying the various pressures influencing the zeitgeist. While there might be something fun in […]
The first moment I touched down in the European Dead Zone, it was chaos. The Fallen, bipedal alien scavengers with four arms and a lot of guns, swarmed around me, firing lasers. Another alien faction, the Cabal, made up of warlike mole people with big suits of armor and a society inspired by the Roman […]
Probably you shouldn’t talk about guns. Yes, 58 people are dead and scores more injured because a sniper with enough big guns to arm an infantry squad unloaded on an outdoor concert. But if you don’t already know what a “bump stock” is, can’t identify the difference between “fully automatic” and “modified semiautomatic” from the […]
For a while there, Louis C.K. was Your Dude: A profane, relatably semi-pudgy real-talker who understood the way your kids drove you nuts, who called out the joylessness of our digital era, and who was baffled by everything from modern love to modern drugs. The 50-year-old comedian-writer-director got you, and a lot of your friends […]
Some movies are obvious hits. Like, for example, Avengers: Infinity War, which made a record-breaking $258 million at the domestic box office last weekend, filling seats and the pockets of Marvel Studios parent company Disney. But not every summer—or spring, or fall—blockbuster has the benefit of 10 years and 18 movies of built-up audience goodwill. […]
The year was 2007. A young upstart from Chicago was promising change we could believe in. Meanwhile, another son of the Windy City, Kanye West, had an idea for a quintessentially Yes We Can pursuit: a puppet-based sketch comedy show. Alligator Boots, which West cocreated along with collaborator and friend Rhymefest, came to life as […]
The seventh season of Game of Thrones opens in its most infamous locale: The Twins. This was the place where the story shattered—where the rules of Westeros, the rules of hospitality, the rules of fantasy stories themselves sheared away from themselves like a great wall of ice and floated away into the sea. It’s often […]
For political news junkies, this past week amounted to one hell of a bender. Nearly every day there was some massive report that would send Twitter into a frenzy. You could almost set a watch by the late-afternoon news alert on your phone. Oh, a notification from CNN? It must be 5pm Eastern! With so […]