The X Prize Is Now Backing Sci-Fi Like It Backs IRL Science
For years, the X Prize Foundation has funded competitions that ask participants to make sci-fi a reality: a device to extract water from thin air, like Star Trek’s replicator; a tool to instantly diagnose disease, like the Star Trek tricorder; a crime alert network, inspired by Minority Report. But for its latest competition, Seat14C, the…
The Meme-First Reality of Today's Music Promotion Game
On April 8, French Montana posted a video to Instagram. That alone wasn’t unusual; the rapper uses the platform as a constant promotional tool, blasting photos and clips of the good life to his more than 6 million followers. This time, though, he slapped a new hashtag on the video, in which he held a…
While You Were Offline: Miss Piggy Makes a Play for Riverdale's Jughead
The past seven days have seen a depressing lack of support for the massive humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, the complicated response to the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and a shift in the diplomatic relationship between the US and Cuba for the strangest of reasons. So basically, 2017 is continuing to be 2017.…
The New Tomb Raider's Lara Croft Uncovers Treasure in Depth
The first trailer for the new Tomb Raider movie is out, and if your relationship with Lara Croft began and ended in the 1990s, this is most certainly not the heroine you remember. Gone is the outlandishly buxom, clearly-designed-by-dudes lady Indiana Jones played by Angelina Jolie and a bunch of jagged pixels. In her place…
Trump-Era Congressional Hearings Have Succumbed to Conspiracy Politics
Stanley Kubrick helped the US government fake the moon landing. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are in the Illuminati. These stories are so well-worn that folks know them by heart. By now, conspiracy theories are a part of everyday American life—so much so that they even come from the mouths of besuited members of Congress on live…
Jeff VanderMeer's New Novel Makes Dystopia Seem Almost Fun
Click:辦公室租用 Why is water wet? Is it important to be nice? How do you know if you're a person, or a fox? Toddlers ask the darndest things—especially when said toddler is a shape-shifting piece of biotech that learns about the world by eating people. And that's just the beginning of Jeff VanderMeer's new novel. Part…
Yes, Videogames Are Serious Art. This Guy's Career Proves It
One of America’s greatest living artists sits in a former clog factory in San Francisco. Tim Schafer’s videogame career has spanned every platform from the Commodore 64 to the current generation of consoles. Along the way, his extraordinary talents as a writer, puzzle maker, and industry rabble-rouser have consistently pushed the entire medium forward. Grim…
Fox's Comic-Con Panel and the Case of the Mysteriously Absent X-Men Universe
Halle Berry was hammered. Well, possibly. It was just before noon on a Thursday, and as part of the Comic-Con International panel for 20th Century Fox, the entire cast of the upcoming movie Kingsman: The Golden Circle had poured themselves a shot of whiskey (part of the sequel takes place at a distillery). Instead of…
Filtering Your World Is Understandable—But It's Not Helpful
What if you could cut out all the parts of a movie you didn't want to see? Showing The Martian to your niece? Farewell, f-bombs and Matt Damon's butt. You're a discerning Star Wars fan? See ya later, Jar Jar Binks. That's the genius of VidAngel, a Utah startup that launched in 2014 with the…
Don't Let the Alt-Right Fool You: Journalism Isn't Doxing
As far as holiday weeks go, this one started out weird, with President Trump tweeting a video of himself beating up a CNN logo. Then it got weirder. CNN's KFile investigative team traced the video—a creative edit of footage from a 2007 professional wrestling match—back to a Reddit user. The Redditor in question, who goes…