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Nathan Damigo moves through rioting crowds like a soldier, and for good reason. Before he founded white nationalist group Identity Evropa, before serving four years in prison for robbing a cab driver at gunpoint, he did two tours in Iraq as a Marine. But when a conservative free speech rally in Berkeley last weekend devolved […]

Open your laptop and fire up some Robyn—Girls is over. After six seasons, America’s most-complained-about show has finally said good-bye, and now is the time for reflection. Related Stories Since 2012, Lena Dunham’s HBO series about four twentysomething friends in New York has been, despite never getting huge ratings, a hotly debated show, whether by […]

Phone calls are back. I noticed this a few months ago, when I received five phone calls in the span of a single afternoon from people who said they didn't feel like sending a text. Weirder yet, not one of them was a parent, sibling, or telemarketer—the usual suspects on my recent calls list. They […]

When Star Wars: Battlefront II launches this November, it's going to have steep competition—not from its fellow holiday releases, but its decade-old namesake. The original Star Wars: Battlefront II, which came out in 2005 (and was the sequel to a game that in turn set up a 2015 franchise reboot), was pure fan service, welded […]

If there’s one truism in comic-book moviemaking, it’s that giant superhero team-ups are almost always sure-fire hits. (And then there's *Fantastic Four; *there are some things reshoots and wigs just can’t cover up.) What’s less true is that superhero team-up sequels will have the same good fortune. All the right ingredients can be there—good cast, […]

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." This is Stephen King's best opening line. It's one of the best opening lines in literature. However, it is *not *the opening line in the trailer for *The Dark Tower *that dropped this morning. That trailer instead opens with Idris Elba slinging guns, […]

A few years ago, Peter Shapiro needed a not-so-small favor from Robert Plant. Shapiro, 44, has been putting on concerts for more than 20 years—everything from intimate late-night Roots gigs to 2015's Deadhead extravaganza Fare Thee Well—and few situations drive him into a state of room-pacing, hair-futzing excitement like a last-minute booking. So when Shapiro […]

It’s the classic space-flick premise: Life as we know it is threatened by an alien force, and there’s only one unrealistically attractive crew that can save us. This month brings two sequels from masters of the genre: James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. We binged on the directors’ […]

Truly understanding artificial intelligence is rare. AI doesn't think in concepts and images the way humans do. It has individual goals, like to preserve humankind as technology's caretakers, or to dismantle complex systems. And in the sci-fi thriller Void Star, things are further complicated by the fact that AI's "thoughts" are actually glyphs, or waves […]

Samurai Jack, which ran for four seasons in the early 2000s under the tutelage of animator Genndy Tartakovsky, was always dark. After a duel with the demonic entity Aku in the premiere, Jack was sent through a time portal into the future where Aku had taken complete control of the planet, turning Earth into a […]