Last Samurai Standing begins with a familiar premise. Desperate samurai dispossessed by the restoration of the emperor enter into a deadly game for a life-changing cash prize – all for the entertainment of anonymous elites. Unlike its inspirations Battle Royale and Squid Game, however, Last Samurai Standing’s violence is chaotic, fast-paced, and kinetic, though it […]
Yesterday, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, censored a segment of its newsmagazine 60 Minutes about men who had been deported to an El Salvador prison. Today, it’s popping up online. 60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at […]
Vince Zampella, who had a major hand in developing franchises like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Battlefield, died in a car crash on Sunday, NBC Los Angeles reports. He was 55. NBC Los Angeles and CBS Los Angeles report California Highway Patrol responded to a single-car crash at around 12:45PM local time on […]
Spotify says it has launched new protections against “anti-copyright attacks” after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna’s Archive announced it’s ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, […]
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had earned another Game of the Year award by the Indie Game Awards last week, but the organization has since announced that the award would be retracted because developer Sandfall Interactive used generative AI during development. The Indie Game Awards also rescinded the Debut Game award given to Expedition 33. Here […]
According to YouTube’s 2025 Recap feature, the podcast I consumed the most on its platform was Seth Meyers’ recurring segment “A Closer Look” on his show Late Night. Last year, I would have argued that this is not a podcast. That it is, in fact, a clip of a TV show. But in 2025, with […]
These days when you want to engage with some media, you can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances – or books, one of the oldest and most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We polled the staff of The Verge to find out what books […]
It’s the holiday season, and Christmas music is utterly inescapable. Look, I love Mariah Carey and Wham! As much as the next guy. But at some point, you get really tired of hearing the same handful of Christmas songs over and over again. So here are 10 suggestions to add to your holiday playlist that […]
Park Chan-wook’s 12th feature-length movie, No Other Choice, begins with Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as a proud patriarch at the barbecue, a vision of the platonic ideal domestic life he will spend most of the movie defending. In the long middle where life is lived, the movie offers its audience mirth and pathos and deep social […]
I waited for the Nintendo Switch 2 for a long time. Rumors of an allegedly-real-but-never-released Switch Pro swirled around for years as I watched fewer and fewer AAA third-party games make their way to Nintendo’s little console that could. There were always enough first-party titles and indie games to tide me over, but I watched […]