Last week, independent production company Magic City Films announced that it would be bringing James Dean back from the dead. Not literally, but digitally, using full-body CGI and existing footage and photos. The Rebel Without a Cause actor will become the secondary lead in a new Vietnam War film called Finding Jack. The two directors,…
The Apple credit card, launched in August, ran into major problems last week, when users noticed that it seemed to offer smaller lines of credit to women than to men. The scandal spread on Twitter, with influential techies branding the Apple Card “fucking sexist,” “beyond f’ed up,” and so on. Even Apple’s amiable cofounder, Steve…
Users increasingly encounter moments when a website asks for permission to gather some personal data or access to their device hardware: “Can we access your GPS position? Your microphone or camera? Your Bluetooth? Can we send you push notifications about breaking news or premium chocolate subscription offers?”Permissions, as these asks are known, give the web…
Before Stanley Kubrick melted everyone’s brains with the unprecedented scientific realism of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hollywood directors had a lot more creative leeway in their space adventure films. Francis Ford Coppola wants to make a movie about giant genitals fighting in space? Sure, why not. Adam West and his pet monkey hanging out on…
Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email blast to his 100,000 or so employees, cutting back the company’s defining all-hands meeting known as TGIF. The famous free-for-alls had epitomized the company’s egalitarian ethos, a place where employees and leaders could talk freely about nearly anything. More recently, however, the biweekly meeting had become…
It’s increasingly common for the data that passes between your browser and a website’s server to be encrypted with HTTPS, which makes it impossible for outside snoops to read. But you don’t get that protection if the URL drops that crucial “S” after HTTP. And while some mechanisms do redirect you to an encrypted version…
The economics of knockoffs is simple: The rich buy Prada bags, while the not so rich opt for fakes, which telegraph to the world they’re just as shallow as the rich, but on a budget. Prada doesn’t like knockoffs because they undercut both the bottom line as well as the purity of its brand.Some scientists…
Surprise! I have nightmares. In my latest, I was stumbling through an eternal field in the dead of night, fog so thick I couldn’t see two inches. Then, out of the mist, a carousel materialized. Carnival music jangled as the wide-eyed wooden horsies screeched round and round. The moment I jerked awake, the meaning was…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Trekkies were the first fandom. But universal acknowledgment does not make a truth true. In fact, Adrianne Wadewitz, a feminist scholar of 18th-century literature, set Wikipedia straight on this point over a decade ago, when she identified the first fandom subculture as the Janeites, the network of Jane…
When the US Air Force launched the F-16 Fighting Falcon in 1979, it had something no other military jet did: a computer. Four, actually. Their electrical signals commanded the aircraft instead of gears and pulleys, ushering aerial combat into the digital era. Now, after fighting in the Gulf and Iraq wars, some of these 49-foot…
