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Star Wars fans met Snoke in The Force Awakens—kinda sorta. The withered baddie was just a fuzzy projection tele-conspiring with his First Order goons. But in December’s sequel, The Last Jedi, the Supreme Leader gets his close-up. “Snoke’s face is no longer a soapy, gelatinous hologram,” says Industrial Light & Magic creative director Ben Morris. […]

Fans of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One have been waiting on a film adaptation of the book since it hit shelves in 2011. Actually, considering the film rights to Cline’s story were sold to Warner Bros. before anyone had flipped a single page, some folks have been anticipating the movie a lot longer than they […]

The morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand. Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a […]

The internet loves to tear things to shreds. So to absolutely no one's surprise, it jumped on Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony—a serious event in which the CEO of one of the world's richest companies is answering to the federal government for mistakes like user-data breaches and enabling Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—like a […]

Lately, in considering the erosion of America, the image that first comes to mind is Mariah Carey's now-iconic "I don’t know her" GIF. The gleeful shake of Carey's head. The subtle mischief of her utterance. The animation frames our current moment with dead-on precision. In fairness, from its earliest days, America has never looked like […]

Music written by teams, David Byrne once wrote, is arguably more accessible than that written by a sole composer. Collaborations, he mused, may result in more "universal" sentiments. But what if your partner isn’t human at all, but artificial intelligence? Now music producers are enlisting AI to crank out hits. Style Counsel Created by Sony’s […]

Click:心理治疗 2017 was an incredible year for videogames—a mixed bag of genre, style, and mood. The best titles ranged from sweeping adventures to tense shooters to meditations on the existential burden of life. Some of the games released this year will go on to be lauded as the most important, profound videogames of this generation. […]

David Cage scoffs at the notion that videogames are fun. “They should trouble you, move you, make you react,” he says. As founder of the studio Quantic Dream, the French developer has been stunning and confounding players for two decades with cinematic games that tackle heady issues of love, death, domestic abuse, oppression, and the […]

Oh, fandom. So passionate, so partisan—and, too often these days, so prolifically peevish. From Tumblr and Wattpad to more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Instagram, online communities have served as rallying points for stan armies: obsessives who comb over every interview and shred of non-news for information about the object of their adoration. But increasingly, […]