Category: Story

My Twitter panic started somewhere in Spain. Six days into a 10-day vacation, the news about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, started making its way to my phone. I wasn’t necessarily trying to unplug or do any kind of social media cleanse, but I hadn’t swapped my SIM so connectivity—and news access—came only…

The game of thrones has always been less of a battle and more of an art. Although weapons and armies are essential tools for its players, statecraft and spycraft are the defining forces that govern its winners and losers. You rule or you die not based on how many men you have but on how…

Of all the ways for someone to describe their job, when that job entails orbiting more Earth than 200 miles above the surface, “I’m just an astronaut” might be the most banal. But that’s exactly how Paolo Nespoli describes his role working with Darren Aronofsky on the documentary series One Strange Rock. Nespoli is being…

This is the story of two George Papadopouloses. The first is a former campaign advisor for President Trump, who made a plea deal Monday in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The second is a CPA with an office near a Best Buy in Novi, Michigan. One admitted…

As I followed the masses of people on Saturday morning toward the Center for Civil Rights, where the march was to kick off, the streets of Downtown Atlanta were bigger than I'd ever seen them. Hundreds of people flooded toward the museum, filling any open space accessible. Standing there waiting, surrounded by people, I realized…

Meet Mark. At 16 feet tall and 12 tons, Mark was built by Gui Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein to do one thing: destroy other machines. The two engineers are the founders of MegaBots, a startup almost as absurd as it is destructive. The company plans to stage bouts between piloted death mechs in an international…

From the moment he started imitating Donald Trump during the 2016 election, Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of the future president became a point of fascination. Twitter, blogs, The New York Times, even Trump himself had an opinion on Baldwin’s semiregular Saturday Night Live performances. Like Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impersonation a few election cycles ago, the…

If stereotypes are to be believed, women aren’t very good at math, but I’ll give this a shot. This weekend, Wonder Woman brought in another $80.3 million at the global box office. Not bad. You know what’s even better? Last weekend, the movie’s second in theaters, it brought in more cash than the latest Tom-Cruise-runs-from-things…

Filmmakers have been trying to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series for more than a decade. But with time-jumping metanarratives and compulsive genre-switching, the eight novels proved tough to wrangle into one film-able narrative. Director Nikolaj Arcel’s version of King’s events finally hits theaters today. Written by no fewer than four writers (not including…

The bouncy beeps of Pac-Man. The percussive build-up in Legend of Zelda. The effusive gibberish of The Sims. The sounds in videogames tell us to speed up, start over, and of course, to keep playing. But how does one set of beeps so effectively tell you you've gained power, while another indicates your character has…