Platinum

Amazon has pillaged the planet in its quest for world domination. Music has not been spared.

There is a moment in "Shrek" when the despicable Lord Farquaad has the Gingerbread Man tortured by dipping him into milk. This prepares us for another moment when Princess Fiona's singing voice is so piercing it causes jolly little bluebirds to explode; making the best of a bad situation, she fries their eggs. This is not your average family cartoon. "Shrek" is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

Bun B is half of the legendary hip-hop group UGK. His partner, Pimp C, died in 2007. Their new album is UGK For Life.

He was the Air Force’s spy chief. Then he went straight to a firm selling spy gear. Now he’s in trouble.

Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life.

Welcome to this edition of Weekly Musings, where each Wednesday I share some thoughts about what's caught my interest in the last seven d...

"We just want to be able to tweet onto our own website."

Breakfast, it turns out. The answer is breakfast.

The trio is back together to talk about this week’s mental health, tech conference hopes, music festival tragedies, and some great apps.

In our November cover story, Taylor Swift talks to Chuck Klosterman about whether or not she really hates Katy Perry

Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood’s most mercurial actors has been documenting his life and craft through film. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster films like Top Gun & Batman. This raw and wildly original documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled look at what it means to be an artist.

Sometimes a phrase someone uses can strike at the core of your own identity. It touches on a piece of yourself that you couldn't articula...

Tugging on the thread of digital bricolage brought me to a wonderful paper by Seymour Papert & Sherry Turkle called "Epistemological Plur...

Every single podcast feed I’m subscribed to.

We’re not looking for answers. We’re looking for logic.

The universe is being built half an hour outside London. About a dozen game developers are working on it.

DJs had to fight misinformation and isolation.

In the late 2000s I was sleeping with all of my friends. This didn’t make me special; we were young in one of the several ways people move to cities like New York in order to be young. We were in general not doing much with our lives and so we did what generation after generation of young people have done in order to combat that particular circumstance: We tried to generate enough sex drama amongst ourselves that we didn’t have to notice that we weren’t doing much of anything, that things were harder than they were promised to be, that we had very little money and that everyone else seemed ...

The remarkable story of the woman who showed us all how to stare down death: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, […]

Procedurally generated blackout poetry. Contribute to mkremins/blackout development by creating an account on GitHub.

The joy of the free-diver, the peace of the loon, the patience of the turtle, and a touch of the ingenuity and panache of the great sea explorers (a Jacques Cousteau or a Captain Nemo). Tending my depths, plunging into seas uncharted, dipping into mysterious pools and emerging to share the treasures and tales I find there (and perhaps hiding a few treasure maps of my own).

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.