The Alt-Right Are Savvy Internet Users. Stop Letting Them Surprise You
Far-right YouTube is the internet age equivalent of conservative talk radio: It’s a place for ultra-conservative commentators to react vehemently, personally, emotionally to the news of the day and the creeping horrors of American progressivism. But while the commentators—who range in ideology from mainstream libertarian to openly white nationalist—certainly owe a debt to Glenn Beck…
How the Surprise New Interactive Black Mirror Came Together
By nearly any measure, Netflix has had a ridiculous year. When all is said and done, the company will have spent upwards of $10 billion (and perhaps as much as $13 billion) to produce more than 550 new movies and shows. Those new movies and shows, in turn, have helped to attract some of the…
Space Photos of the Week: Check Out the Stretch Marks on Mars
This week’s space photos take us on a mini tour of the solar system. First up is that bright nuclear fusion reactor in the sky, our sun. This week NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory captured a colossal coronal hole, a magnetic opening in the sun that spits out solar wind laced with highly charged particles. When…
Say Goodbye to @sweden, the Last Good Thing on Twitter
When @sweden began its grand experiment in 2011, Twitter had never seemed more full of possibilities. In New York, Twitter served as a digital bulletin board to organize protesters at Occupy Wall Street. In the Middle East, tweets served as the roots of the Arab Spring. Companies signed on to engage with customers; celebrities made…
In Physics, Crossing a River Is Just Like Landing a Plane
To non-pilots, landing an aircraft in a crosswind looks all but impossible. When the wind is perpendicular to the direction of motion of the plane, the plane has to aim in one direction—its wheels not lined up with the runway—so it moves in another. To pull it off, the pilot must quickly change the orientation…
Yaeji's 'One More' Hops Languages, and Codes, With Purpose
Kathy Yaeji Lee creates in the multihyphenate. She’s a DJ, producer, singer, and occasional rapper who pilots between cultures as nimbly, and as wondrously, as she injects them with alternate life. On “One More”—a thump-shy club soother with a beat that never quite breaks free from its casing—the Korean-American wunderkind attempts to ground herself amid…
Physicists Try to Revive a Super-Safe, Decades-Old Cancer Treatment
In a room at Northwestern Medicine Chicago Proton Center, Robert Johnson keeps a small collection of plastic heads. At first glance, they look like they’ve been lopped off the top of department store mannequins. But they’re more lifelike than that—made of materials that mimic bone, flesh, and brain. “One of them even has a gold…
Don't Blame Fortnite for Activision Blizzard's Layoffs
In a year that's already seen mass layoffs across multiple media brands, what happened yesterday at videogame publisher Activision Blizzard somehow felt more like a reckoning. During an earnings call with investors, chief operating officer Coddy Johnson confirmed that despite "record revenues" in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company would lay off approximately 8…
A Crazy Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Dying Star
In September 2014, astronomers saw a dimming point of light in a small galaxy half a billion light-years away. It looked like an ordinary supernova—a dying star that exploded and whose light was now petering out. But the following January, Zheng “Andrew” Wong, a student intern at Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California, noticed that…
All 141 Champions in League of Legends, Explained
Gone are the days of multiplayer videogames with a set roster of characters. Sure, people still play Team Fortress 2 more than a decade after its release, but its nine classes remain just as they were in 2007. Now, though, incessant updates and patches have turned the most popular titles into ever-evolving sagas, with ever-evolving…