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 […]
When director Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey 50 years ago, he intended it to be a "nonverbal experience." The movie’s dialogue was sparse, and it relied heavily on visuals and score. It was, Kubrick told Playboy in 1968, a subjective film, meant to reach audiences "at an inner level of consciousness, just as […]
Nowadays, TV is everywhere. It's in living rooms, on laptops, streaming on phones. Very rarely are there events anymore that cause everyone to gather 'round the television set. But that doesn't mean folks don't bond over great TV anymore. From Master of None to Handmaid's Tale to Game of Thrones, a lot of shows had […]
With Solo in the rearview mirror and no animated series on the air, all the eyes watching Lucasfilm are turning towards Star Wars: Episode IX, which—even though it's a year and a half away—is already getting people talking, thanks to a couple of pieces of casting news and a surprising fan theory that's getting a […]