Tag: CULTURE

The internet, as recent Senate reports have shown, can be an awful and confusing place. Hate speech, election meddling, PewDiePie—and we still can't get Twitter to let us edit posts. But every now and then, the garbage fire calms down just a bit and some joy creeps in. This post is for those moments, the…

I was at what should have been a farmers’ market in Berkeley, California, last year when a throng of black-clad antifascists tried to scrap it out with far-right ralliers in the middle of a park named after Martin Luther King Jr. I watched scrawny college students get pummeled by hulking, be-swastika-ed ex-soldiers and ex-law enforcement…

In a piece of news no one was expecting to read Monday morning, Netflix announced that it's working on a reboot of the classic children's tale Pinocchio. OK, maybe that part wasn't entirely unforeseen. The story of a wooden puppet boy come to life is widely beloved—of course Netflix would want to make a movie…

Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED's look at all that's happening in the world of pop culture. Have you gotten over your Oscars hangover yet? Good, because we've got a new Dark Phoenix trailer, some sad news about The Suicide Squad, and Mahershala Ali's new sci-fi project all on deck. Step…

Boy, oh boy. Technically, thanks to Labor Day, this past week was shorter work-wise than most. That said, the internet never takes a day off, so it was just as full as the rest. Think we're kidding? We're not. As proof, here's a series of unrelated tweets that represent just a fraction of what people…

From the nation’s founding, it’s always been fashionably American to rebel. Ours is a land of particular obsessions: food, war, success. Over time, though, our civic obsession with resistance, and how one deploys it for personal design, has taken an unsightly form. Just look to Donald Trump; he resists irresistible truth with the flagrant abandon…

Donut County, an ersatz version of Los Angeles County filled with donut-loving denizens, has some problems. They are strange sinkholes around town, growing as they devour, eating up restaurants and homesteads and people. The game works like this: Somebody, somewhere in Donut County orders a donut on a fancy new app. You, as the proprietor…

Science fiction is where artificial intelligence goes to suffer. In nearly every robot-adjacent story, artificial lifeforms succeed in achieving sentience only to realize that they are abjectly, unendingly oppressed. That realization kicks off an array of terrible events: suicide, submission, or rebellion leading, most often, to death. But these dire possibilities are limited only by…

Early this morning, Tom Holland, aka Peter Parker aka Spider-Man in Marvel's movies, took to Instagram to reveal the first trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home. (He tried to, at least. There were a few technical difficulties before he finally got it uploaded.) The broad strokes of the clip match up with what we already…

David Dobrik is an extremely popular YouTube personality—his vlogs have attracted nearly 10 million subscribers and counting. Yet, for all of his reach, he has yet to win over another creator very well-liked on YouTube: Ariana Grande. (Her video for "thank u, next" has gotten more than 118 million views in less than a week.)…