Tag Archives: culture

Group chats, including at least one of mine, can’t get enough. #KateGate—loosely, a collection of theories around the whereabouts and well-being of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales—presently seems to be occupying more brain cells than oxygen. Gossip has been flying ever since January, when Middleton took a step back …

On February 24, 2022, Stepan Bandrivskyi woke up before dawn and got ready for a special day: his birthday. It wouldn’t be a particularly happy one. Hours earlier, a couple dozen miles away, Russian tanks had rolled across the borders of his native Ukraine. The full-scale invasion had begun. Like …

Scientists keep taking their own lives, and no one knows why. That’s the central mystery at the start of 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Chinese author Cixin Liu. But it soon unfolds into something far grander: There’s a mysterious VR …

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers had a problem: The land of Hyrule kept falling apart. Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom might be able to guess why. Some of the game’s big advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, which allow players to create any tool …

Burnt rubber and gunfire are not the most pleasing of smells, but for action games, they might be the most common. At least, that’s true for GameScent, a new device that aims to make gaming more immersive by adding smell to the equation. GameScent, which dropped late last month to …

Willonius Hatcher was looking for a way in. He’d tried just about everything to break into Hollywood, and because there no longer exists a traditional entry point into its hallowed pantheon of performers—we can thank the internet for doing away with all notions of conventional success—the pursuit of it sometimes …

They enter a small, bright office where two comfy-looking chairs and a blue couch surround an oval coffee table. In the corner stands a large Ficus tree of dubious vitality, and a quartet of framed diplomas presides above a coffee machine. Dr. Monica VanTyne, a tall white woman with dark …

Don't be fooled, National Geographic's new series Photographer isn't about analyzing images. Talk of lighting, depth of field, and good angles is minimal. Instead, it's an examination of what compels a person to do whatever it takes to get the perfect shot. They “work hard to the point of death,” …

This week the internet has been awash in confusion about what TikTok is: a video-sharing app with goofy viral dances; a trove of user data, ripe for the plucking; a political football; a place where scores of creators make their livings. All of these are true. Still, that hasn’t stopped …

The accusations began around the release of Spider-Man 2 last October. More came when Alan Wake II hit a week later. They were all over the replies to the social media accounts of Sweet Baby Inc.: hateful comments, many of which hinged on the idea that the Montreal-based narrative development …