Generally speaking, Veep and Silicon Valley have very little in common. Both are inside-baseball comedies about, respectively, the White House and the tech industry, and both have coveted Sunday night slots on HBO, but other than that their themes rarely overlap. Last night Veep changed all that. As the Season 6 premier opens, everyone from […]
Pour out a little, if you will, for Steve Whitmire, who was fired this week after nearly 30 years of voicing Kermit the Frog—and whose response was simply that he was "devastated to have failed" Jim Henson. Whitmire's quagmire isn't the only crappy news this week (oh, hello, revised Senate healthcare bill!), yet it feels […]
Not quite two years ago, Netflix launched simultaneously in 130 new countries. It now operates nearly everywhere in the world. With that expansion has come explosive international growth—along with the challenge of how best to introduce its homegrown favorites, like Stranger Things, to an audience that spans all the way to the Upside Down and […]
As a typeface designer for Adobe, Paul Hunt spends most of his time creating the building blocks of written language. Fonts communicate more than just the words on the page; the way they arc, curve, bulge, and taper can shape the way a message is received. (Looking at you, Comic Sans.) But recently, Hunt turned […]
If you're starting to wonder if last week was just one long bout of déjà vu, you're not alone in that feeling. From new talk of Obamacare repeal to another terrorist incident in London, a lot of news stories over the last few days have sounded like tales people have heard before. It's been apparent […]
Netflix has created shows with talk show hosts. It's brought beloved shows and people out of retirement. And now, with yesterday's announcement that David Letterman would be creating a longform interview series for the streaming platform, Netflix has managed to do both at the same time. Hold on, you might be thinking right now. There […]
Shamik Ghosh had been picking up tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk for several months when he logged on in winter 2010 and saw a perplexing request: Someone wanted him to act out a series of Winter Olympic sports—snowboarding, ice hockey, figure skating, etc.—and they were offering to pay him $3.50 for every video that he […]
Almost every night, I sit in bed and stare at my phone. Then I fall asleep and dream about the internet. I send friends imaginary iMessages and hear the woo-Oop sound and then the ding when they reply. I scroll through nonsensical tweets and read Slack messages from my boss. Since I bought my first […]
One might think that rumors out of the galaxy far, far away would subside once Star Wars: The Last Jedi hit theaters. One would be wrong. Even as director Rian Johnson's film continues to get headlines for its costume choices, box office hauls, and lost scenes, gossip about the future of the franchise was spreading […]
Steven Soderbergh is nothing if not ever-evolving—except, maybe, for tireless. After establishing himself as one of his generation’s great auteurs with movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, and Traffic, he vowed to stop making theatrical films. During the supposed hiatus, he made HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, and two seasons of […]