In Boots Riley’s trippy new film Sorry to Bother You, hunger is the main throughline. The hunger for truth. The hunger for justice. The hunger to succeed personally, and even more so in one’s professional life. At RegalView, a low-level telemarketing firm in Oakland, one path to success presents itself in the form of code-switching. The disaffected Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is hungry to prove himself.

He’s a damaged soul eager for anything other than failure and hardship. On the advice of a coworker (Danny Glover), Cassius begins to use a “white voice” when speaking with prospective customers—what white people “wished they sounded like,” Glover explains—and its pay-off is immediate as it is hilarious (Cassius's white voice is orated by David Cross). He becomes the company’s top salesman, earning the title of “Power Caller” and a promotion upstairs, where it’s required he talk in his white voice at all times.

But professional advancement comes with a moral clause. Cassius is wedged between doing what is right and what is profitable; one reason he took the job in the first place was to help his uncle save his home, which was in foreclosure. These are questions of survival Riley is volleying at us—what, exactly, are you willing to give up for the American Dream? Your friends? Your principles? For someone like Cassius, there are always conditions to Making It. For black people, in particular, success has its own fine print.

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Sorry to Bother You is a deliciously untame thing: an allegorical satire about the exploitation of labor and land. (It joins a cohort of black futurity coming to the screen in recent years, including Get Out by Jordan Peele and Random Acts of Flyness, which debuts in August on HBO; Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death is also in development at HBO.) Like reality, the film is a genre mash-up in the most satisfying of ways—part workplace comedy, part existential drama, with elements of science fiction. The movie’s heart centers on economic injustice and class struggle. It’s heavy stuff, and rightfully so. These are heavy times. But longtime activist and rapper Riley, who wrote and directed the film, never burdens the audience with too much at once: he garnishes the film’s steady unease with splashes of dark humor courtesy of its leading cast (an exceptional Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, and Armie Hammer).

The tsuris surrounding Cassius worsens as coworkers form a union and threaten RegalView brass with a strike. “Trouble’s already here,” Squeeze (Steven Yeun), the lead organizer, says at one point. “I’m just helping folks fix it.” But it’s too late for Cassius; intoxicated by the taste of success, he refuses to join their cause, even as his artist girlfriend, Detroit (a radically enchanting Thompson), finds his new situation at odds with her own beliefs. (According to one of her t-shirts: “The future is female ejaculation.”)

Riley’s gonzo dystopia begins to unfurl in greater detail once Cassius settles in on the executive level, where he sells slave labor “over the phone.” RegalView, as it turns out, is part of a larger corporation called WorryFree Solutions. Its deranged visionary of a CEO, the bro-y, coked-out Steve Lift (a role Hammer was destined to play) offers people lifetime employment, housing, and food in exchange for non-stop labor. WorryFree, however, is anything but paradise. Individuals who sign up live in prison-like accommodations, eat scraps, and work as indentured servants for the rest of their lives. It’s a perverse critique of human capital—the gig economy, mass incarceration, and an underpaid workforce collapsed into one sinister illustration—and an existence that doesn’t feel too far from what one possible future holds in false utopias like Silicon Valley. In this, Riley gives us one of the year’s sharpest pieces of political art. Sorry to Bother You arises from the best kind of fiction, one inspired from the fury and turbulence of real life.

In the film’s final and most revealing act Cassius is stirred from slumber. After a one-on-one meeting with Lift takes an absurd turn, he’s forced to reconsider the cost and question of his success (I won’t spoil the surprise here). For his part, Riley reconstructs the do-anything pursuit of capitalism into a collage of racial horror. The conclusion is both shocking and oddly poetic, but never once did it read as unbelievable. Throughout, the film’s aims remain locked on the issue of hunger. Only, in the end, Riley isn’t afraid to take it one step further and show how the powerless, and people of color in particular, no matter how much fight they put up, ultimately get swallowed whole.

The last seven days have been difficult for all kids of reasons, most more important than the [closure of the final Toys "R" Us stores], even though folks did need to take a moment to shed a tear at the site of mascot Goeffrey the Giraffe leaving the store one last time. (We’ll leave it to you to work out the importance of the World Cup on your own, because your mileage may vary.) As the world worries about how bad the upcoming Trump/Putin summit will be, take a moment to distract yourself with everything else the internet has been talking about over the last week here.

Justice Anthony Kennedy Announces His Retirement, America Announces Its Anxiety

What Happened: As one man announces his intention to leave the Supreme Court, the rest of America slowly begins to panic over what that will actually mean.

What Really Happened: By Tuesday, it seemed as if the Supreme Court had already made its bombshell news of the year by upholding President Trump's travel ban. But, it turns out, that was just a warm-up for an even bigger announcement on Wednesday—news that was at once half-expected and shocking.

Yes, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, creating the second vacancy on the court in three years. Why is this important? Well, because Kennedy was famously a swing vote on the court—called by some the court’s most important member for that very reason—and because of who’ll get to choose his replacement, and what kind of replacement he’ll choose.

Trump famously said, during the 2016 campaign, that all Supreme Court justices he’d choose would be anti-abortion, something he backed up with his short list for the open seat he, uh, "inherited" in 2017. In other words, don’t expect any new pro-choice Supreme Court justices any time soon, something that many are already thinking about, amongst other things.

You might remember what happened when the last Supreme Court seat came available. (If you don’t, just Google "Merrick Garland.") But that’s not going to happen this time, it seems.

Sure! Why wait when it’s your guy making the decision this time? Not to mention, this time around, thanks to what happened last year, it’ll be even easier to seat a controversial candidate.

The Takeaway: Take it away, Twitter.

Chief, Un-Staffed

What Happened: So much for the idea that John Kelly would bring discipline to the White House; instead, he’s apparently about to leave, likely for exhaustion.

What Really Happened: Cast your mind back just a year or so, to when Reince Preibus left the role of chief of staff for the Trump Administration, and was replaced by outgoing Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. He was, we were told "the perfect pick" for the job, a "beacon of discipline" who "won’t suffer idiots and fools." Seems great, right? So, how did it all work out?

For those wondering when “one year in the job” will actually be…

He started July 31, 2017, if you really want to know. But is he really leaving? Some poured doubt on the report…

…while others pointed out that, honestly, this is pretty much business as usual for the Trump Administration.

McMaster was fired days after Trump denied such a thing was a possibility, in case you don’t remember.

In many ways, this is a story people have been expecting for some time, especially considering Kelly had been reportedly sidelined and ignored for some time, prompting many to call for his resignation. Even as the media started to get its arms around the story, a follow-up report was already suggesting that Kelly could be gone much sooner than the end of July.

So what about those potential replacements named in the original report, anyway?

OK, so Mick Mulvaney seems to be counting himself out of the running, but what about that other guy, Nick Ayers?

Sure, but what about…

…Oh. That’s certainly an option, I guess?

The Takeaway: Worth noting: At least one rumor is placing former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks as a dark horse candidate for the position. Keep that in mind as we move forward.

Shine On

What Happened: As one vacancy opens in the White House, another—one that has been surprisingly empty for awhile—appears to close, with arguably the worst job applicant getting hired.

What Really Happened: Speaking of Hope Hicks—and of chiefs of staff, but we’ll get there in a second—this week, rumors started swirling that the White House may finally have found someone to replace her as the person in charge of communications after months of looking. He’s an … unexpected choice.

Yes, Bill Shine, the former Fox News co-president? In case you’re wondering why he left…

Oh, that’s right, he resigned amidst controversy surrounding sexual harrassment at the company. Still, surely he has some redeeming qualities.

But here’s the interesting thing: Later in the week, it turned out that he wasn’t going to take the job that everyone expected him to. (Indeed, he’d actually taken himself out of the running for that job months ago, according to reports.) Or, at least, he wasn’t going to take the job title…

Chief of staff for communications? No wonder John Kelly wants out. But as Shine officially accepted the gig—prompting some to wonder how much closer the White House/Fox News connection could become—others wondered just how someone went from "disgraced former network president" to White House official so easily. Apparently, it’s all to do with mutual friends.

So, for those keeping track: The White House has hired a man who was forced out of his previous job amidst allegations of covering up sexual harassment. Now he’ll be in charge of what the Trump Administration tells the American people—and it’s not as if the White House already has a credibility problem or anything—and, by the way, he got the gig because of the president’s close relationship with one of said network's hosts.

Surely someone has to be in favor of this move besides the president, right?

Oh, of course. It’s not as if O'Reilly has a horse or two in this race or anything.

The Takeaway: Even looking beyond the reasons why Shine might be ill-suited to the position, let’s just think about the turnover at the White House when it comes to people trying to shape the message.

So, About That Immigration Bill…

What Happened: When it comes to immigration, House Republicans really can’t get their act together, even with an all-caps assist from the president.

What Really Happened: Perhaps all of this is making you forget that children are still being held in cages at the border because of a Trump Administration policy that was said to have been halted by an executive order (that the president reportedly regrets signing). You might remember that, last week, House Republicans postponed an immigration bill in the hopes of getting it to a place where they could pass it. Certainly, the president sure did.

Last week, the postponed vote happened, and … let’s just say that the postponement didn’t appear to help its chances of passing.

That definitely didn’t go well. Indeed, it was a disaster all around. At least no one will portray it as a failure for President Trump specifically.

OK, sure; that positioning looks a little embarrassing for the president. Perhaps even more embarrassing is that support drew criticism from the media he normally relies on.

Meanwhile, the immigration system continues to be horrifically broken. If only someone was willing to step up and say something about how bad things are…

It’s a start.

The Takeaway: Protests against the administration's immigration policies started on Thursday with more popping up over the weekend. This is far from over.

The Annapolis Newsroom Shooting

What Happened: A newsroom is attacked by a gunman, and the person who said he was ready for "vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists" claims no one should try to connect him to it.

What Really Happened: Thursday afternoon, terrible news came from Annapolis.

The attack by a gunman on the Capital Gazette newspaper was reported by national media. But stunningly, reporters at the Capital Gazette itself kept updating the situation as it was going on.

The editor of the paper also took to social media after the fact, to address the press en masse on the matter.

The shooting happened just days after former Breitbart tech editor and internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos had made comments advocating journalists be shot. That didn’t go unnoticed on social media.

Such commentary didn’t go unpunished, either.

There might have been an alternate reason for that suspension, as it turned out.

But Yiannopoulos was unrepentant about his comments, instead posting to Facebook that his comments had been texted to a reporter at the New York Observer as a joke, and that, "if there turns out to be any dimension to this crime related to my private, misreported remarks, the responsibility for that lies squarely and wholly with the [Daily Beast] and the Observer for drumming up fake hysteria about a private joke, and with the verified liberals who pretended they thought I was serious." (As of this writing, the alleged shooter—and his motivations—are still being investigated.)

The Takeaway: Putting Yiannopoulos aside, let’s consider how incredible it is that the Capital Gazette did, in fact, publish a paper just hours after the shooting—and used its Opinion page to honor those killed during the shooting.

Late in Nier: Automata's runtime, the game takes an unexpected break from sci-fi action to share the backstory of two minor characters. It does so by turning itself briefly into a text adventure, the sort of thing you'd find in Twine, that tells you how these two came to be where they are. The pain and persecution they've been through; how they held onto each other through it. And then, at the end of the story, if you make a certain choice, the narrator sums up her journey:

"I won't stop. No one stops."

In that moment, Nier: Automata suggests that the experience of these minor characters, the suffering that gives way to perseverance and then, cruelly, even more suffering, isn't isolated to them, or the other unlucky members of the main cast. Instead, the game posits that this experience is a cycle. A universal one, catching everyone and everything in it. We suffer, and we go on, because have to. No one stops.

Nier: Automata is obsessed with cycles, and with breaking them. The game's genius lies in interrogating every element of itself, from the most cliched videogame trope to the most virtuosic narrative flourish, and pushing that obsession onto the audience. Nier: Automata is a series of resonant frequencies, one amplifying the other until everything is bathed in its rogue transmission.

This entire article could be spent recounting the fine details of the plot of Nier: Automata, which builds upon the stories told in Yoko Taro's previous games, but by way of simple summary: In the year 11,945, an army of androids created by humans fight an army of toy-like machines created by alien invaders for control of Earth, with what remains of the human race cordoned off on the moon. This war has gone on for centuries, and shows no sign of ending. For the androids of Yorha, a group of special forces who serve as the game's viewpoint characters, war—and death—is everything. The only thing.

At the end of the game's prologue, our protagonist, 2B, dies alongside her field partner, 9S. And then they're resurrected, their minds uploaded into new bodies, and sent back out into the fight against the machines. Not even total annihilation is an escape from what 2B calls, in her opening narration, "a never-ending spiral of life and death."

Nier: Automata plays like a traditional action role-playing game, with a combat system—courtesy of the veterans at Platinum Games—that gives depth and grace to a deserving title. Taro and his team's games are always thoughtful, but often broken and underfunded. Automata is neither, and it plays beautifully, and yet its gameplay flourishes further emphasize the cyclical purgatory of the life of the androids. Violence is routine, a means of filling up time, growing stronger, and even entertainment. But violence, both as game mechanic and as the core of life on Nier's earth, is drained of meaning by its inevitable repetition: War is background noise, ceaselessly droning toward tragedies that are doomed to repeat themselves over and over again, as androids and machines struggle with a growing degree of self-awareness they neither asked for nor know precisely what to do with.

How do you live when your life's path is predetermined? How do you possibly make meaning out of your existence within that kind of inevitability? Nier: Automata confronts that question with the somber gravity of tragedy, and the trickster's grin of a game designer in his element. If Nier: Automata wants to highlight the cycles its characters are trapped in, it also wants to highlight the way those cycles can be broken, made sense of, or subverted. Being alive might mean that we're all trapped. But it doesn't mean we have to play along nicely.

The game pulls this tension off by constantly undercutting and transforming its own play. One moment, the game will be precisely what you signed up for: a third-person action game about an android with a blindfold and a big sword. Then, a moment later, the game is a 2D bullet-hell jet-plane shooter. Then that jet plane transforms into a mecha. Then the android jumps out of that mecha again, you hack and slash for a little while longer, and the camera switches again as you turn a hallway. Now it's a 2D platformer. Later, the game throws hacking minigames at you in the form of twin-stick shooting straight out of Geometry Wars. One segment is reminiscent of a 2D Castlevania, as you fight and climb through a layered, ruined castle full of machine lifeforms. Another resembles an old-school fighting game. I could go on and on.

The big picture cyclicality creates, paradoxically, a space for near-infinite experimentation inside of it. Everyone in this world wants to make sense of their lives within the fixed elements—life, death, more life, an endless war on behalf of masters you've never even met—that keep them trapped. They will do anything for this goal, and the game will, too. The game transforms itself to discover itself, as if some mind confined deep within it believes that, by contorting this way and that, it can somehow understand what it's really made of. Nier: Automata "ends" several times, each finale serving as a chapter break, giving the game a chance to try out a new perspective, a new approach. It is a game constantly being made new.

And as Nier: Automata transforms, so do the androids, who try to find a way of living with little guidance from their human creators. And so do the machines, who begin to imitate governments and relationships found in archaeological records of present-day humanity, imitating their own mortal enemies in an effort to find something on this foreign planet worth holding onto.

As they do so, the sides continue to fight. One of my favorite characters is an android named 6O who functions as 2B's mission control, giving her orders for a relentless series of suicide missions while also talking about her horoscope and crying about the crush she has on the girl on the other side of the room. At one point in the game, a side quest involves picking flowers to cheer her up. That juxtaposition between the frivolous and the terrible is everything to Nier: Automata. The tragedy of the story is so great that, if the game is to believed, that juxtaposition might be the only thing that matters.

Nier: Automata takes the weight of all that emotion, all its pain and playfulness, and focuses it into a personal story about a pair of androids struggling to understand themselves and their enemies, despite being so commodified by the war they're stuck in that they don't even merit proper names. It's in the telling of that story that Nier: Automata earns its spot as Game of the Year. Not just because it tells that story well, which it does. Nor because it remains entertaining to play throughout, which it does. Nor for its excellent localization, its stirring soundtrack, or any of the other small flourishes it absolutely nails.

Instead, Nier: Automata is the Game of the Year because it manages to tell its story with every part of itself. In the way every single element collaborates to dramatize the terrible, cyclical nature of life while simultaneously breaking from that focus to find moments of joy and pathos within it. The way it transforms itself, telling a story of hope and failure and death and rebirth from every angle it can think of. And the way it sees love, and kindness, and simple humanity in that story. Nier: Automata is a meticulously designed tragedy engine that somehow, improbably, manages to go beyond tragedy into something better. It is very much like an android of its own creation, her entire body fine-tuned for combat, taking a break from the never-ending cycle of life and death to pick flowers for a friend waiting somewhere far away.

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The Psychology Behind Video Game Sounds (1972-1998)

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Fortnite, a free-to-play shooter by Epic Games (Gears of War), has taken over the world. That may sound like exaggeration, but I couldn't overstate the popularity of Fortnite if I tried. It is massively played, and even more massively watched—on Twitch, 66 million hours of Fortnite have been watched in the past two weeks, with about 200,000 viewers tuning in at any given time. (In March, the streamer Ninja played with Drake, raking in the highest single-game viewership Twitch has ever seen.) It is also, somehow, massively complicated.

Fortnite started off as something less than a success. As originally released last July, it was a cooperative third-person shooter with interesting but messy crafting mechanics—a little bit Gears of War, a little bit Minecraft, with some of the cartoonish glee of Team Fortress 2. Then, inspired by the unanticipated success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Epic added a free-to-play "battle royale" mode in September: one hundred players on a large island, fighting for survival, with all the fort-building mechanics of the main game intact.

And it exploded.

There's a wisdom about crossover success, about the sort of games that become popular, not just among gamers, but among moms, and kids, and Drake: they're simple. They're Words With Friends, they're Angry Birds. Authentically huge games are simple, they're increasingly mobile, and they don't take up too much time. They're drop-in, drop-out affairs that don't require focus as much as they offer distraction. What's fascinating about Fortnite is that it defies, with aplomb, all of that wisdom. (At least mostly; Epic has since made the game available on iOS devices, subsequently invading classrooms all over the country.)

I had spent time in PUBG, Fortnite's spiritual predecessor, but for whatever reason I spent the first four and a half months of 2018 without spending a second in the biggest gaming phenomenon of the moment. Upon remedying that, my first sortie goes … poorly. I airdrop into a deserted neighborhood and go running. My only weapon is a pickaxe, which I can use to build simple structures with materials I find: wood, concrete, sheet metal. I'm going to need something tougher before another player shows up, so I go scavenging. For a solid five minutes, I gather up a small arsenal of brightly colored shotguns and assault rifles, and begin toying with building myself a fort, to protect myself, to see the surroundings.

Then: I run into another player. They get the first shot off. I die. So it goes.

During my next few sessions of Fortnite's Battle Royale mode, I learn that high-level play is as complex as it is invited. The best players dominate on these islands, building quickly and furiously, dueling each other with distance sniping and towering forts. The efficiency with which they craft and structure defensive facilities are impressive. They make split-second decisions that I can't yet imagine: when to build and when to shoot, how and why and whether to engage at any specific time. It is, in short, like any other complex, gamer-oriented multiplayer shooter, and chances are, I will never, ever be good at it.

And yet it's now one of the most immensely popular games of the world. The answer to why is complicated: a confluence of brightly colored, inviting images, the right game mode at the right time, and Drake, among others. But the fact that such a complex, gamer's game could become so popular is worth noting. It suggests that gaming's insularity is not for the reasons that many may think, that perhaps cultural factors are more responsible for the inaccessibility of games than their mechanical sophistication. What games might need, then, to reach new audiences are not to simplify, but to broaden: to find ways to hit cultural and aesthetic registers that appeal to demographics beyond the core gaming audience.

People will, in fact, learn to play games, even the most complex and messy ones. Fortnite is proof of that. You just have to give them something to invest in. And if you can get Drake, that'll help.

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'Ready Player One' is in theaters now

In Hollywood, it’s all about size. Big budgets, supersized casts, boffo box office openings. And in that world, there is perhaps nothing larger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If Avengers: Infinity War proved anything, it’s that the MCU had earned its scope. It would make sense, then, that the latest installment—Ant-Man and the Wasp—would look to hitch its wagon to its bonafide stars. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t need to. It has, to borrow the internet’s latest mini-meme, BDE.

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Before we get into that, or any more size jokes, a few points of clarity. Ant-Man and the Wasp takes place pretty much concurrently with Infinity War. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) briefly mentioned in that movie that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) would be sitting out the battle with Thanos, and in his standalone movie we find out why: His jaunt to Germany in Captain America: Civil War put him in violation of the Sokovia Accords, which forced him into house arrest in the Bay Area. So while the other Avengers were fighting Thanos out in the galaxy and in the fields of Wakanda, Ant-Man was stuck at home. How his story will tie in with the greater MCU isn’t even truly revealed until the (very good, but terrible to spoil) post-credits scene—a throwback to the time when all of the Marvel movies’ But wait, there’s more! moments teased the massive team-up to come.

And really, that’s exactly what an Ant-Man movie needs. Frankly, it’s what the MCU needs. After a few films where the fate of the entire universe hung in the balance—Infinity War, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok—Marvel needed a palate-cleanser, a movie that wasn’t all-or-nothing. And while director Peyton Reed’s movie trashes a few San Francisco tourist destinations, no country is decimated, and no planet gets pummeled. Hela, the Goddess of Death, is nowhere to be found. It’s just a little side-hustle about Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) trying to rescue Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer)—their wife and mother, respectively—from the quantum realm. It's a Post-It Note reminder of an adventure.

And it's a fantastic time. The setup: Scott is a just a few days away from completing his house arrest when he has a dream about Janet Van Dyne, a quantum entanglement that provides the key her family needs to get her out after being stuck there for 30 years. (An unanswered question: Where does one eat/sleep/poop in the quantum realm, which basically looks like a floor-less hot-box tent at Coachella?) But, as is always the case, getting Janet out isn’t that simple—especially since they’re trying to do it while a gangster, played by a wonderfully maniacal Walton Goggins, and a new mysterious villain called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) both vie for control of Pym’s lab and all the technology inside.

This kind of tightly-constructed story not only avoids the problems other recent Marvel movies have had with trying to do too much, it also gives the movie time to breathe, to develop characters and build worlds, without having to shift focus to a whole new location and collection of heroes every 10 minutes. All of which is to say, it lets Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp grow—and steal the show. Ant-Man may get top billing, but Hope is the one driving the action. (I mean that literally, she hits the streets of San Francisco like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.) Not only does she get the better fight scenes, she also delivers a fair share of one-liners, which isn’t an easy task in a movie that brought back Michael Peña’s Luis for some grand scene larceny. And when it comes to world-building, the Ant-Man sequel delves even further into the quantum realm, showing its many wrinkles and rainbows in a way reminiscent of how Doctor Strange built out its various mystical realms. It also, in a nod to super science nerds, features tardigrades, the microscopic "water bears" that look like pill bugs in khakis.

Then there's the matter of Ant-Man and the Wasp's breadth, which, wisely, focuses simply on Scott Lang's attempt to help Hank and Hope while not getting caught for violating his parole. It's efficient, and feels like a turn of events that could take place in the time allotted. Marvel movies have always had strange scopes: They’re massive events of global (or galactic) significance that often begin and end in under a week. It’s hard to tell since the sun never sets in space, but I’d estimate the massive fights of Infinity War wrapped up in about 48 hours of real time. Ant-Man and the Wasp completes its full arc in a smooth 36, give or take, along with a comfortably digestible two-hour run time. And that's all the time it needs—in both duration and story—to unspool its plot and catch Scott and Hope up with all of the Avengers, chronologically speaking. Everything you need in one tiny time capsule.

Truly, lean-and-meanness is Ant-Man and the Wasp’s greatest gift. After a few films full of all-you-can-eat chest-thumping, Reed’s movie is a necessary digestif, all the joys of a Marvel movie shrunk down into a quick caper that cuts through the post-Infinity War fog. Yes, this is all part of Marvel’s design. The studio knew it needed a breather between that film and next year’s Captain Marvel. But that doesn’t mean that Ant-Man and the Wasp, with all of their ease and banter, shouldn’t saunter in and have a little fun. The payoff is huge—even if the movie isn’t.

The fact that you're even reading these words represents a victory.

WordPress-powered websites publish more than 77 million posts each week. The New York Times runs about 150 stories every day. (Here at WIRED, it's more like 15 or 20.) Last year, 687.2 million books were sold in the United States—and that's just print versions, not e-books. Speaking of which: even as Amazon opens more stores, independent bookstores continue to thrive, despite the fact that a quarter of adults haven't cracked a cover in a year. Words are everywhere. Not all of them are the best words, granted, but we're awash in them like at no other point in our history. They're in our books and our e-readers, in our newspapers and magazines, on our laptop and phone screens.

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If scale is your metric, there's never been a better time to be a reader. But by most other metrics, there's also never been a more confounding, daunting time to be a reader. There's less time, more options; less focus, more distraction. Perhaps in acknowledgment of that, reading with an old-timey capital R has begun to feel more urgently necessary. Not simply scrolling through feeds and timelines, wading into the tributaries of attribution and reference and losing any sense of how you got there. Not snacking, but feasting; cramming story by the fistful, holding on to a sentence to better coax out its subtext. And when your job can reach you in the middle of the night and your schedule is shared with multiple other people, to read—to engage single-mindedly, for art rather than application—is in its way an act of resistance.

So how are we all doing it? How are all these words getting into our eyes (inescapably) and ears (increasingly) and brains (hopefully)? How is the way we read changing? The short answer, as it always is, is: People are adapting. The longer answer is that there are almost as many answers as words—which is why, starting today and continuing throughout the week, we'll look at some of the many ways technology is shifting our relationships with books and stories. They won't be all of the answers, and some might not feel like answers at all, but with any luck, they'll make you reconsider your own. And maybe, the next time you're in line or on a bus, you'll pass the time not with a scroll, but with a book.

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High-speed cameras, commonly known as slow motion cameras, imbue milliseconds with the weight they’re so rarely granted. A balloon pops, with the water inside it still holding its shape; a bullet shot underwater leaves an attenuated cone of air in its wake. Daniel Gruchy and Gavin Free, known on YouTube as The Slow Mo Guys, have captured these moments and more than 150 others in painstakingly slow detail. (In one personal favorite, the duo recorded the fracture pattern in glass that was heated and then rapidly cooled. At 343,000 frames per second, five seconds of IRL action resulted in 19 hours of footage.)

“Everything looks cooler in slow mo,” says Free, who aside from his involvement in multiple RoosterTeeth productions also works as a slow-motion cinematographer on big-budget features (Dredd, Snow White and the Huntsman).

Since November 2010, the Slow Mo Guys channel has amassed millions of subscribers and nearly 1.5 billion views—which is a lot of frames, feats, and stories to share. In this Tech Support, the guys answer viewers questions about where they get all of the food they blow up, and which stunts were the messiest, the hardest and the most painful (like having a soccer ball thrown against your face). Gruchy shares that he’s tried much of that exploded food, and Free reveals his sound design technique for filling lapses in sound during the videos.

Watch the video to learn more. Don’t worry, it plays at regular speed.

Today WIRED unveiled more than 100 new illustrations of our staff. Created by New York–based artist Simone Noronha, the black-and-white profile portraits capture each person who works here. Browse all of them on WIRED’s redesigned staff page, and expect them to crop up in other places, too, such as on WIRED reporters’ social media accounts. (Sharp-eyed readers may have already noticed that WIRED’s editor in chief, Nicholas Thompson, has been using Noronha’s portrait of him on Twitter. The writers for our Ideas vertical also got their drawings early.)

WIRED design director Ivylise Simones and I worked closely with Noronha to refine the portraits, and WIRED photographer Beth Holzer shot reference photos of nearly every staff member.

I spoke to Noronha about how the WIRED design team discovered her work and how she creates lively digital portraits.

WIRED: At what point in your career did you start developing the illustration style that you have now?

Simone Noronha: I’m an illustrator and designer based in New York. Originally though I’m from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where I spent the first 18 years of my life, always drawing.

I’m not sure I can pinpoint when I developed the style I have now. It’s an ever-evolving thing as I try to improve my work. That said, I like to think of illustrative style as just our natural flaws shining through and doing the best with it.

WIRED: What tools do you use?

SN: I work primarily digitally. I’ll fuss over details, constant erasing, refining and redrawing, so working digitally complements my workflow. As far as software goes, for illustrations it’s Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and for animations it’s a mix between Adobe After Effects, Animate (Flash), and Photoshop. And for the past year I’ve been working on a Cintiq, and that's helped speed up my work tremendously.

WIRED: Can you tell me about your experience with portraiture and how it plays into the rest of your work as an illustrator? When we reached out to you, we had just seen a few examples on your website: a side profile illustration of your friends for their wedding invitation and a portrait you made of Mike McQuade, an illustrator WIRED has worked with.

SN: I’ve always loved drawing portraits and getting lost in people’s faces. My earliest memory of truly impressing my mum was with a drawing I did of Luciano Pavarotti’s face at age 4. So that really started everything for me. I was hooked after that, drawing my friends and doing my own angsty teen self-portraits.

At art school I ended up majoring in graphic design, which was when all my work took on a graphic bent. And then my career started in branding design. It was good, but after a while I began to miss illustration and decided to make a switch. Serendipitously, one of the last projects I worked on as a graphic designer was rebranding Redscout, where I drew 128 graphic portraits of their staff for custom business cards. That was quite a project, so when this came about I understood what I’d be dealing with and had the confidence to take it on.

Because I have been drawing people a lot over the years, I’m aware that the way we see ourselves is slightly heightened compared to what real life or photos convey. I keep that in mind and try to strike a balance between being accurate and being complimentary.

WIRED: During the two months that we were working together, I noticed that your style evolved slightly.

SN: Yeah, good eye! It began to evolve as I worked on this series, but never straying far from the original vision. Over the course of drawing your diverse team, the initial rules I established began to modify, in a good way! Some of the things I was doing with one portrait wouldn’t work on another, so I had to adapt and then make sure it was consistent across the board.

WIRED: We wanted these portraits to capture the essence of each individual, but in an impressionistic way. How did you go about deciding the range of different tones, shades, and textures to apply to the portraits?

SN: As far as all the decisions in terms of tone, shade, and texture, those were defined in the early examples of work you were drawn to. As you mentioned earlier, Mike McQuade’s and my friends' save the date portraits were pieces you liked. I had gone through rounds of development to make those for Mike and my friends, so all that thinking easily translated over when you asked me to replicate that on a larger scale.

I treated each of the portraits as an icon that had to “read” well at large and small scales. When you have that thinking in mind, tiny details don’t matter as much as getting across gestures.

Also, my work is generally heavily textured. That’s part habit, part my calling card at this point, and part a very convenient way to deal with hair, both facial and otherwise.

More on WIRED

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The Future of WIRED is Here

Introducing the all-new Backchannel, Ideas section, and WIRED Guides.

For as long as we’ve had TVs, videogames, smartphones, and tablets, there have been scientists, politicians, and parents worrying about whether too much screen time will make kids less healthy (maybe), more violent (debatable), and hopelessly distracted (Sorry, can you repeat that?). Here’s a short history of people fearing the worst.

1951

Anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton describes TV as “a visual education in how to do wrong.”

1954

Fredric Wertham writes, “I have found that children from 3 to 4 have learned from television that killing, especially shooting, is one of the established procedures for coping with a problem.”

1977

Following the release of a videogame called Death Race, Gerald Driessen, a behavioral scientist, describes gaming consoles as “definitely negative … The person no longer is just a spectator, but now an actor in the process of creating violence.”

2004

“Children with higher weight status played moderate amounts of electronic games,” a study in The Journal of Adolescence read, “while children with lower weight status played either very little or a lot.”

2017

“Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol,” says Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the UK-based Royal Society for Public Health. “It is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people’s mental health issues.”

Read More

How to Reverse Infertility •
Tools for Fetal Surgery •
Save the Preemies •
The Year's Best Tech Playthings •
Cashing in on Kiddie YouTube •
The #MiniMilah Effect •
Rethinking Screen Time •
A Brief History of Digital Worries •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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