What are VR music videos good for?

Top Chef notwithstanding, it is rarely advisable to see how a sausage is made. This is not a new aphorism—aphorisms are rarely new—but technology has given it new resonance. It has never been easier to distribute bonus content, to be ‘closer’ to artists, and to see heretofore-mysterious processes. A

Between Me and the Night promises magical realism with spooky undertones

When you’re a kid, monsters aren’t just something you entertain as a distant possibility—there are times when you’re, like, 90 percent sure they’re actually there. I can remember several nights lying awake in bed in my childhood home, unable to close my eyes because of my deep conviction that someth

Blackstar won’t tell you how to die

I spent a lot of time this week listening to “Subterraneans,” the last song on 1977’s Low, by David Bowie. I didn’t know what else to do. Like a lot of other people, I had a feeling—this response to death we all have, with varying degrees of terror and/or sadness attached to it—combined with the use

If only Congress worked more like this game

A new teaser for Netflix’s House of Cards plays like a highlight reel of protagonist Frank Underwood’s most heinous exploits. As the show prepares to drag itself into a fourth season this March, it’s worth remembering not just how villainous Frank’s rise to power was, but also how ludicrously easy.

Go Sunset a Watchman

This past summer saw, within a month of each other, the arrival of two of the year’s most unwanted works: Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Tale of Tale’s Sunset. No one asked for, and no one is celebrating, Watchman’s publication. Leaving aside the troubling context surrounding the “discovery” of