The United States women’s soccer team won its first World Cup final since 1999 on Sunday in a 5-2 shellacking of Japan—the same team it lost to in the 2011 final. Before a crowd of 53,000 in Vancouver, US midfielder Carli Lloyd scored three goals in the game’s first 16 minutes, sealing her Golden Ball award for best player in the tournament.
The Shark Week behemoth is back. On July 5, Discovery Channel’s week-long ode to the ocean predator returned for its 28th season, promising more hours of programming than ever. Last year, more than 42 million people watched Shark Week, making Discovery the highest-rated cable channel in all of television.
When David Letterman announced he was stepping down as host of the Late Show after a decade-spanning and format-changing run, many hoped the new host would be a woman or a person of color, as there are so few in prominent roles on mainstream American TV. Instead, the job went to Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, a spin-off of The Daily Show.
The World Health Organization announced June 30 that Cuba has become the first country in the world to stamp out transmission of HIV and syphilis from a mother to her child.
HBO broke new ground in April when it became the first major cable channel to offer all its content online without also needing a traditional cable TV subscription. Until now, there wasn’t any way to accurately measure how successful the new $15 streaming service, called HBO Now, really was.
This post has been corrected.
John Oliver is an expert at taking serious, sometimes dull political issues and mining them for laughs. This time, however, he was lobbed a softball.
Say what you will about its narrative cohesiveness (or lack thereof), but the science in the 2014 movie Interstellar is pretty sound. Sound enough, in fact, that some scientists think it should be taught to students.
Sony and Marvel announced Tuesday that the next Spider-Man will be Tom Holland, a 19-year-old British actor who starred in the 2012 film The Impossible, and will be in Ron Howard’s upcoming film, In the Heart of the Sea. Holland will play the web-slinger in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, before getting a film of his own in 2017.
One problem with streaming TV, which was meant to break up the traditional cable TV bundle and give customers more choice, has been that finding ways to watch all of your shows, movies, sports, and news on the internet can be complicated—and end up being just as costly as buying a regular cable subscription. But increasingly, it’s possible to get a whole lot of good stuff for much cheaper than a standard cable bundle.
You’ve seen the portable ecocapsule. You’ve basked in the glory that is the luxury “floating seahorse” house. And now, in what resembles a synthesis of the two futuristic creations, Serbian design studio Salt & Water has conceived of the floating hotel, complete with catamaran-apartments that are meant to roam off to their own spots of solitude.
Even if you didn’t know the name of James Horner, it’s very likely that you know his work, deep in your bones.
No matter what you think of HBO’s brooding, violent anthology series True Detective, or of its divisive creator-writer Nic Pizzolatto, it’s hard not to be impressed by the show’s opening credits. Whether or not we’re truly in a “Golden Age” of television is a subject for debate, but—the quality of the shows themselves notwithstanding—there’s never been another time with so many engrossing title sequences.
American sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick once famously asked, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While he was on the right track, the answer appears to be, no, they don’t. They dream of dog-headed knights atop horses, of camel-birds and pig-snails, and of Dali-esque mutated landscapes.
NBC will announce today that it is keeping Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, but in a new role, according to the New York Times (paywall), Wall Street Journal (paywall), CNN, and others. NBC removed Williams from his post in February following reports that the deeply esteemed news anchor had seriously exaggerated experiencing an attack on his helicopter while reporting in Iraq—a claim he later admitted was embellished (video).
“Cutting the cord” is the metaphorical phrase that refers to canceling one’s cable TV subscription, often in favor of internet services like Netflix and HBO Now. But at least someone, or someones, in the Bay Area of California is taking the cord-cutting phenomenon a bit too literally.
Lewis. Damian Lewis. The former Homeland leading man and current Wolf Hall star is the new frontrunner to replace Daniel Craig as everyone’s favorite secret agent James Bond—at least if you trust the oddsmakers.
The game has changed. Following the season 5 finale Sunday night, HBO’s colossal hit series Game of Thrones has now either gone past or diverged from every major plot in the books on which it’s based. That means that two things will now fundamentally change the way people enjoy the series: Show watchers are safe from book spoilers, and book readers are just as much in the dark about the story as everyone else.
Science has just confirmed what many dog owners have believed for centuries: Your dog really does care about you.
In space, no one can hear you moan.
A team of bioengineers have created a computer that runs on water droplets. It’s not going to replace any of your gadgetry, but the goal is to use the logic behind a computer network to control and manipulate physical matter.
George R.R. Martin’s best-selling fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire—which spawned the blockbuster HBO series Game of Thrones—is now getting its own adult coloring book. The book, which is being “authored” by Martin himself, will be released in October by Bantam.
The FIFA schadenfreude train keeps on rolling. United Passions, a movie about the origins of the international football governing body—which FIFA itself heavily financed—made a hilariously bad $607 during its opening weekend in the United States.
Calling all pizza and movie lovers: Our day has come. The global pizza franchise Pizza Hut has created a pizza box that, yes, doubles as a movie projector. Feast your eyes on the “Blockbuster Box”:
