Category Archives: Blog

It was a little over a year ago that Scarlett Johansson found herself embroiled in controversy over Ghost in the Shell, in which she plays a Japanese woman in a white woman’s (android) body.

Now she and Ghost in the Shell director Rupert Sanders are catching heat again, for a new project that will have Johansson playing a trans man. 

And if the actress’ reaction to the pushback is any indication, Johansson clearly learned nothing from the Ghost in the Shell dustup.

On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter and other trades broke the news that Johansson would be starring in Rub & Tug as Dante “Tex” Gill, a massage parlor owner in the 1970s and 1980s.  Read more…

More about Scarlett Johansson, Entertainment, Discrimination, and Movies Tv Shows

Seth Rogen is sick and tired of how Twitter has been dealing with the racists and white supremacists who plague the platform.

The actor called out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday in a public tweet.

Rogen says he’s been privately messaging Jack via Twitter for months, trying to figure out what the company has in mind when it verifies white supremacists on its platform. Read more…

More about Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Racism, Social Media, and Seth Rogen

It’s not about the features you see — it’s about the ones you don’t.

On Monday, AndroidHeadlines published what it claims is the first official rendering of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4. Unlike the Galaxy Tab S3, this tablet has no home button. It also features a larger display and is missing the Samsung logo across the top bezel.

More about Samsung, Smartphones, Tablet, Galaxy, and Phone

With so many rappers adding “Lil” to their stage name, it’s easy to get confused.

In this goofy guessing game, Mashable team members tried matching faces with the “Lil” names. It went … well, you be the judge. Read more…

More about Music, Mashable Video, Artist, Hip Hop, and Game

The next iPad could get a serious upgrade. 

On Monday evening, Apple developer Steven Troughton-Smith tweeted iOS 12 code that he believes shows evidence Apple will be launching an iPad with Face ID. 

He discovered AvatarKit, the framework behind Apple’s animated emoji, known as Animoji and Memoji. It’s pretty useless without the TrueDepth camera sensor, which projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a 3D map of your face. The technology made its debut with the iPhone X.  Read more…

More about Ipad, Face, Ios 12, Tech, and Consumer Tech

Regardless of your views on President Trump, we should all be able to agree that the man is not a great writer. His speaking and reading skills are also debatable. But let’s stick to the writing bit today.

Trump’s grasp on grammar is so bad, we published a list just this week compiling the highlights from his presidential typos. 

Then, on Tuesday, Trump tweeted this:

JK Rowling, the internet’s favorite Trump critic, who also happens to be a great writer, summed it up pretty nicely.

More about Watercooler, Culture, Celebrities, and Books

Air travel can be a truly awful experience that involves being waaaaay too close to far too many people. But there’s also something strangely romantic about it. Especially when your trip involves potentially falling in love with a fellow passenger.

Rosey Blair and her boyfriend were on a flight home on Monday night, but their seats were in different aisles. Rosey decided to ask a woman to switch seats with her. In so doing, she may have altered someone’s life forever. 

More about Plane, Web Culture, Culture, and Web Culture

Fire has returned to California’s wine country as the flames thrive on bounties of parched land. 

The County Fire began on Saturday afternoon and since then has devoured over 1,000 acres of land each hour. As of Tuesday morning, the Golden State’s largest fire had spread over 70,000 acres in Yolo County and into the edges of Napa County.

The return of fire to the region, which cast ominous, orange glows over San Francisco to the south, is especially unwelcome after last October’s firestorms in the region, which were the deadliest in the state’s history. 

More about Climate, Science, Weather, California, and Wildfire

President Trump declined a request to lower the American flag in memory of the five victims who died in a shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis last week, according to the publication.

Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley asked that the flags be lowered at federal government buildings, but his request was denied. Trump has ordered flags be lowered after other mass shootings. 

Trump, who has referred to the press as the “enemy of the people” multiple times in the past, said on Friday that journalists “should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.”  Read more…

More about Donald Trump, Flag, Capital Gazette, Culture, and Politics

Lyft says its new bike-share program will revolutionize urban transportation. The only problem? Uber kind of beat them to that particular revolution.

In a Monday blog post, Lyft announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Motivate, a bike-sharing company that operates the Citi Bike program in New York and Ford GoBike in San Francisco. 

“We’re excited to invest in bike-share to continue building the world’s best transportation for the future of our cities,” Lyft tweeted.

As part of the deal, Lyft will now own Motivate’s technology, including its apps, bike-tracking services, customer support, and bicycle maintenance systems. When Motivate’s bicycles will become available on the app to Lyft customers was not immediately clear.  Read more…

More about Lyft, Bike Sharing, Motivate, Tech, and Transportation