If you’ve been craving more Star Wars-related news in the wake of the trailer heard ’round the Internet, you’re in luck. (If, on the other hand, you’re tired of hearing about anything that has to do with Star Wars… well, sorry?)
Is the Internet broken yet?
In 1960, there were over 2,000 northern white rhinos roaming the Earth. In 1984, there were just 15. Today there are only five, including just one male, and he’s under around-the-clock armed surveillance to protect him from poachers.
Some people are so talented, it’s just not fair. That seems to be the case with Emmanuel Lubezki, perhaps the best cinematographer in the world, who also happens to be a fantastic photographer (the two, of course, are very closely related).
“Is anyone else freaking out right now?” said Dan Price, the owner of a small Seattle-based credit card processing company, to a room full of his employees after he informed them of his new salary policy. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
The Sopranos. Breaking Bad. The Wire. Mad Men. These are the prestige television dramas that most say form the foundation of the 21st century’s “Golden Age of Television.” But those four shows don’t tell the whole story.
HBO has streamed its biggest show on its new standalone internet service, HBO Now, and it wasn’t a catastrophe. In fact, it was anything but.
If a human soldier commits a war crime, he has to face the consequences (at least in theory). The same goes for human operators of drones (again, in theory). But if a fully autonomous war machine with no human operator goes rogue and kills a whole bunch of innocent people, who would be responsible? Its programmers? The manufacturers? Finding someone to blame would be hard enough, and proving it in a court of law would be nearly impossible.
“I’m sorry, it looks like you choked, Joffrey.”
Serial became an internet phenomenon almost as soon as it aired beginning in October 2014. A spinoff of This American Life, the podcast, hosted by Sarah Koenig, investigated the 1999 murder of 18-year-old Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee. The main subject of the podcast, and the man convicted for Lee’s murder, was Adnan Syed, her ex-boyfriend.
The premium cable channel HBO’s motto for its new streaming service for cord cutters, HBO Now, seems to be, “All you need is the internet” (video). Which is interesting, because HBO is many things, but it is decidedly not an internet company. And it’s making sure you know that.
What was otherwise an uneventful contest between two of the NBA’s worst teams turned into a historic moment April 7, when the Sacramento Kings’ Sim Bhullar became the first person of Indian descent to play in an NBA game.
The day has come: You can finally get HBO without a pay TV subscription.
Google, which is developing its own wireless service, will reportedly offer its future phone customers international roaming at no additional cost to their plans, according to The Telegraph.
The future of television in the United States may hinge, oddly enough, on the government’s interpretation of an 80-year-old law.
Whatever happened to predictability?
It’s a sad state of affairs in bossland.
HBO is the belle of the TV ball, and a rapidly changing TV landscape hasn’t changed that. If anything, it has only inflated it.
Internet television service Sling TV, which has been pitching itself as a cheaper alternative to cable in the United States, announced today that it will soon offer a version of HBO as a $15-a-month addition to its basic $20 package.
European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti—who is currently orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station—posted some harrowing photos of Super Typhoon Maysak to social media on March 31. The first big storm in the erratic typhoon season, Maysak has already killed at least five people in Micronesia and is set to hit the Philippines this weekend.
Updated at 1:50pm EST on April 2 with news that Disney will be making a live-action version of Winnie the Pooh.
The new host of Comedy Central’s popular left-leaning political satire show The Daily Show will be Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old stand-up comedian from South Africa who joined the show in December as a correspondent. He will replace Jon Stewart, who hosted the show for nearly 17 years and announced in February that he was stepping down.
I once took an undergraduate course on The Wire, widely considered the greatest American television show ever, in which I learned more about urban politics, crime, and public health than I did in other courses actually devoted to those subjects.
The Germanwings flight that crashed on March 24 in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board, was deliberately brought down by co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, French prosecutors said today. According to the cockpit voice recorder, Lubitz was alive and breathing as the plane descended, while the captain—locked out of the cockpit—desperately pounded on the door to be allowed back in.
