Daniel Rourke /stream

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Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative? A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play…

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The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth.

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A few weeks ago I dusted off my expired Iranian passport photo, an unsmiling eight-year-old version of me – stunned, angry, wearing tight grey hijab and staring far beyond the camera.…

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“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay…

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Scientists are debating about a possible return of the Neanderthal. With stem cell technology breaking through elsewhere and a complete sequence of the Neanderthal genome at hand, it’s seemingly only a…

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Archaeology was institutionalized by a reification of the past into governmental branding, such as through images of Palmyra on the national currency, or school textbooks. Although Palmyrans wrote and probably spoke…

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Science fiction, cyberpunk included, has always been a bit of a boys club. Think of the names that we most readily associate with the genre. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson,…

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A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines…

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Science fiction tells us that a change in a past event, caused by the intervention of a time traveler, will open up a parallel timeline that leads to an alternate present.…

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Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach.

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Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery.

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If you’ve never seen James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day – either on the big or small screen – now’s the time to embrace this wonder of filmmaking and effects.

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On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed an audience of 35,000 people at Rice University in Houston and put forth his vision for sending an American to the moon…

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The human is always already posthuman. The human is the animal that relies on technology in order to realize its humanity. The “post-human” is thus an ontological category, more than a…

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Larry Page, one of Google’s two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, “Oh, we’re really making an AI”. Google right…

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In early 2015, a Fedex package arrived at the studio of artist/scientist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. It contained only a sample of hair and cheek swabs.

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This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat…

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How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic features of the problem are plain…

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Though defining exactly what art is is a near-impossible art all its own, human involvement seems to be an essential tenet, whether it's in creation or conceptualization.

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Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative? A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play…

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“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay…

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Can you relate? 2) “As a white person, if I don't automatically agree with whichever person of color is directly in front of me, I run the risk of being labelled…

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Archaeology was institutionalized by a reification of the past into governmental branding, such as through images of Palmyra on the national currency, or school textbooks. Although Palmyrans wrote and probably spoke…

Bookmark

Science fiction, cyberpunk included, has always been a bit of a boys club. Think of the names that we most readily associate with the genre. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson,…

Bookmark

A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines…

Bookmark

Science fiction tells us that a change in a past event, caused by the intervention of a time traveler, will open up a parallel timeline that leads to an alternate present.…

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The William Buckley debates was political discourse at its finest. Although watching Norman Mailer throwing shade at Gore Vidal is entertaining, James Baldwin taking Buckley to task holds a special place…

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Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery.

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Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the…

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On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed an audience of 35,000 people at Rice University in Houston and put forth his vision for sending an American to the moon…

Bookmark

The human is always already posthuman. The human is the animal that relies on technology in order to realize its humanity. The “post-human” is thus an ontological category, more than a…

Bookmark

Larry Page, one of Google’s two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, “Oh, we’re really making an AI”. Google right…

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The simplest way to distinguish between the "weird" and the "eerie", the late Mark Fisher writes, is to think about the difference between presence and absence. Weirdness is produced by the presence…

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This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat…

Bookmark

Though defining exactly what art is is a near-impossible art all its own, human involvement seems to be an essential tenet, whether it's in creation or conceptualization.

Bookmark

Horror movies don’t have the best track record when it comes to depicting queer characters. Often there are no LGBT characters at all, and when they do appear they’re likely to…