Culture

There is the failure to do what’s expected of me, and the failure to do what I expect of myself.

Credit has always been a nebulous idea in the world of hip-hop.

Cities change, and the way that writers write about them changes as well. A place's past can act as a kind of call to arms, or it can become the backdrop for a different kind of story.

Contempt for reality television is less a specific response than a herd sentiment. And yet, after so many hours under its spell, I feel like I’ve turned a corner: Gordon Ramsay is a genius.

Gus Van Sant's 1995 adaptation of Joyce Maynard's novel revolved around self-control under observation. Two decades later, it feels both prescient and all the more relevant.

The spy's relationship with the villain Colonel Sun veered from tradition: absent a manufactured fatal love triangle, Amis examined the toxic, unsatisfying power dynamics between like minds.

Talking to a member of the video game speedrunning community about the appeal of the practice, its status as a sort of performance art, and tensions over encroaching commercialization.

Guy Maddin's new feature imagines "unrealized, half-finished or abandoned films by otherwise successful directors" not as artifacts to pine after but as the accumulated muck of cinematic history.

On humanity's often fanatical, obsessive, and fearful road to the cosmos over the course of the 20th century.