The Inevitable Agony of Olympic Spoilers
Going into the snowboarding finals of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Red Gerard’s chances of nabbing a medal looked bleak. He’d bumbled his first two runs, placing him second-to-last amongst the 12 snowboarders competing in slopestyle. But Gerard’s final performance was breathtaking—a series of gravity-defying jumps that launched him to the top of the scoreboard,…
I'm Deleting All My Old Tweets Because Nothing Matters
While I gave birth to my first child in 2015, my brother sat across the street from the hospital in a bar, live tweeting his experience of waiting to meet his nephew. As the hours of my long labor wore on, my brother got drunker and his jokes more off the wall. When my son…
How Feminists in China Are Using Emoji to Avoid Censorship
Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the…
Black Panther’s Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero
Click:ink defoamer As Hollywood events go, there are few more congratulatory than film festival awards ceremonies, where everyone wants to cheer for the Next Big Thing before they get huge. Yet, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the biggest applause at the awards show wasn’t for a director or actor—it was for Rachel Morrison, a…
10 Great Shows You Can Binge-Watch in a Single Weekend
The only thing better than having a weekend jam-packed with all sorts of exciting plans is having a weekend with no plans at all—especially if it means you can dedicate a blissful 72-plus hours to hopping on the couch, firing up your favorite streaming machine, and testing your own torpidity. Rather than rewatch Breaking Bad…
What Oversharing on Social Media Taught Me About Parenting
On November 7, 2012, I took a break from four months of posting messages about men and heartbreak—in addition to my usual commentary on culture, identity, and politics—to make an announcement. The closing scenes of a complicated long-term relationship had resulted in a pregnancy that deserves a word more comprehensive than “unplanned” to describe it.…
As MoviePass Explodes, Its Growing Pains Hurt Subscribers
Click:HE5000 Last August, MoviePass had 20,000 subscribers. As of February, it had 2 million. That explosive growth has given the company scale and leverage it hadn’t dreamed possible by this point. It’s also given scores of MoviePass customers a serious headache. Every fast-expanding company has growing pains. But over the past six months, MoviePass has…
Why Are the Velociraptors in Jurassic World So Big?
Every new Jurassic film brings a raft of new questions: Was Tyrannosaurus rex really that visually impaired? Could a Pteranodon really pick up a human with its feet? Why is Bryce Dallas Howard running in heels? One question fans might not have thought to ask, though, was whether or not the velociraptors were the correct…
The WIRED Guide to Memes
Memes and the internet—they're made for each other. Not because they’re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive mind. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. And, friends, the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place.…
A Brief History of Putting Small Things on the Big Screen
Click:carbon steel gate valves Hobbits, fairies, Dr. Septimus Pretorius’ people in bell jars—Hollywood has been miniaturizing things in movies for decades. But ever since Pretorius put ballerinas and kings behind glass in Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, filmmakers have used many different methods to make people appear small onscreen. Back in the 1930s, it was…