Anyone with a pair of testicles can be a man. And it’s always possible to receive a field promotion to captain, however little time you may have actually served in the military. It thus falls to “doctor” to be the most unearned title in the world of super-humans. While lesser …
Pitchfork, the music website that everybody loves to hate, has just released a list of the alleged 200 best singles of the 1980s. Response on the internet has been, well, response on the internet: discussion of the merits of the songs included is vastly outweighed by outrage at the absence …
Greetings, extraterrestrial visitors! Ever since our own American astronauts, Lt. Chup Munnler and Captain E.G. “Spurts” Grandango, made contact with the people of Proxima Centauri VII eighteen years ago, Earth has become a popular tourist destination for visitors from every quadrant of our galactic sector. We’re pleased to welcome our …
Straight Outta Compton is in theaters as I write this, and like just about everything the former Andre Romelle Young touches, from subpar headphones to white dingbats from Detroit, it has turned to gold, raking in over $100 million at the box office so far. What exactly this means for …
The internet has been aflame this week following a lengthy article in the New York Times about the corporate culture at Amazon. (A follow-up on Gawker, arguing that tech money in general, but Amazon in particular, has helped render Seattle unlivable, made some good points, but was undercut by having …
The life of a critic is hard. The pay is low, the pressure to produce is high, you get called an elitist and a snob, you have to take in a lot of worthless crap, and occasionally you make a stupid decision that ends your career. Well, maybe that last …
Season 2 of True Detective wrapped up this weekend, and internet law dictates we must form an opinion about it as soon as possible, without any pesky reflection or context. It was, to be honest, a bit of a mess; then again, internet law also dictates that we must either scoff …
The long-awaited first debate from the comically overstuffed field of Republican candidates for the presidency took place last night, and it was a grand old time for all. At least, I assume it was; I didn’t watch it because I’d rather chew on hot coals than watch these horrible assholes …
It’s the dog days of August, when baseball teams are either in the head of a pennant race or sweating it out in meaningless late-season games after falling out of contention. Basketball and hockey are over, football seems like a cold, distant winter mirage, and Americans still don’t give a …
One of the advantages of making a sports documentary, at least in theory, is that you avoid the pitfall of so many other types of non-fiction film: the lack of footage. If you’re making a movie about a band or a performer, there may be relatively little filmed evidence of …
Great novels — and Philip K. Dick’s unsettling 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is certainly a great novel — tend to have in common the fact that much of their greatness is in their ability to communicate the internal. From their omnipotent viewpoint, they can use …
The minimum wage went up in San Francisco and, blaming the cost of doing business, the overrated burrito hucksters at Chipotle hiked up their prices. Predictably, conservatives popped their collective gaskets, and everyone on the right started screaming “ENJOY THE BITTER FRUITS OF YOUR COMMUNIST WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION, LIBTARDS”, as if …
In a recent review of Ernest Cline’s new novel, Armada — the poorly received follow-up to his hugely successful ’80s geek-culture wallow Ready Player One — io9’s Germain Lussier makes the curious claim that it is “an ultra-nerdy book, but at times, it feels like it doesn’t trust the reader.” Replace …
One never expects an atomic bomb to go off in such a quiet way. It’s also never supposed to be in the form of a long, lovely, exquisitely detailed shaggy dog joke. But Jim Jarmusch’s groundbreaking, entirely wonderful Stranger Than Paradise — which, astonishingly, is 31 years old this month — …
TONY STARK, “IRON MAN”: Look, I like all these people. I think relationships are important and there’s nothing wrong with being chummy with the people you work with. But as long as I’m providing the lion’s share of the funding, this is a business, and it’s going to be run …
