Month: March 2019

Let's just start by reminding everyone what's happening in the world, cool? Puerto Rico still needs your help, California is burning and even Pokémon were in on the Russian efforts to destabilize last year's elections. If nothing else, the history books are going to have a field day with 2017, presuming everyone makes it out…

The first meme of 2018 was Mariah Carey publicly complaining that, prior to her New Year’s Eve performance, no one had brought her “hot tea.” It was funny and in keeping with Carey’s legendary diva antics, but it was also a GIF-able summation of the year’s desperate need for soothing. President Trump had closed out…

The short history of podcasts—how and when and why they went from the nichiest, wonkiest content platforms to a star-studded, self-contained media ecosystem with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual advertising revenue—comes down to three turning points, each of which triggered a wave of growth bigger than the last and only one of which…

I press a buzzer on a dingy apartment door, and a single pulsing eye appears on the intercom screen. My voice comes out frail, disappointed, all age and regret. "KPD," says the visitor, meaning Krakow Police Department. "I need to talk to you for a moment." The voice that responds is incoherent, rambling, paranoid. I…

Late last night, Riz Ahmed—who just hours earlier had become the first male of Asian descent to win an acting Emmy, for his role in The Night Of—uploaded a photo to Instagram. “We here,” the caption read; paired with the image of Ahmed, Lena Waithe, and Donald and Stephen Glover all clutching Emmy statuettes, it…

After weeks of near-silence, writer-director Rian Johnson is finally starting to talk about December's Star Wars: The Last Jedi (seriously, for those looking for details on the new movie, there's a lot straight from his mouth below), but never you mind that. Even as Johnson started sharing Star Wars super-secrets, Lucasfilm accidentally stole his thunder…

Happy long weekend, friends. How’s it going? Feeling rested? After last week, you deserve a break. And that's not even because everything that happened last week was bad—Jay-Z did drop a new album to apologize to Beyoncé and Germany did legalize same-sex marriage, after all—it was all just kind of a lot. In other words,…

Billie Lurk, the protagonist of Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, is probably scowling as she breaks into the beauty salon. The place is a front for the Eyeless—a criminal syndicate that might actually just be a cult worshipping a hidden trickster god—but that's not what makes Billie so angry. She crouches, gripping her knife in…

With all due respect to the masochists in the Tour de France, the 2,200-mile bike race is not the most grueling endurance event July has to offer. That honor falls to Comic-Con International: San Diego, in which 150,000 pop-culture obsessives flock to a beautiful beach town—and then head straight inside for four days of panels,…

It’s 8:30 am on a blindingly sunny Texas morning in March, and most of Austin is still passed out. Abdalaziz Alhamza—Aziz for short—is one exception. The night before, the 25-year-old had salsa-danced and chain-smoked into the early morning hours with his fellow millennials who flock to this city each year for the 24-7 party that…