Category Archives: Blog

Was it dirty or just a bad-luck play? That’s the controversy enveloping the NBA Playoffs after San Antonio Spurs star Kawhi Leonard injured his ankle landing on the foot of Golden State Warriors center Zaza Pachulia. 

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich didn’t mince words in ripping Pachuila during a media session Monday — but the internet quickly struck back as only the internet can.

If you’re just catching up, here’s the play in question. Did Pachulia move under Leonard on purpose or by accident? That’s the debate currently roiling NBA fandom.  Read more…

More about Sports, Nba, Entertainment, and Sports

Prepare to be shocked: The internet is using Donald Trump’s own words against him after he did something he has criticized others for doing.

According to a blockbuster Washington Post scoop, Trump revealed some classified information he was not cleared to share with a pair of Russian diplomats who visited the White House last week. 

The quotes from the story are stunning:

• “Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.”

• “Trump ‘revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.’”

• “Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. ‘I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,’ Trump said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.” Read more…

More about Russia, Donald Trump, Classified, Us World, and Politics

One of the NBA’s most respected figures just lit into Donald Trump — again. 

It’s definitely not the first time Gregg Popovich, a five-time NBA champ with the San Antonio Spurs, has done this. And it’s almost certainly not the last. 

We’ll soon get to why Popovich’s criticism carries more weight than it might seem at first blush — but first, his latest monologue. It’s a doozy. 

“I feel like there’s a cloud, a pall over the whole country, in a paranoid, surreal sort of way,” Popovich said on Sunday before the Spurs lost to the Golden State Warriors in Game 1 of their NBA Playoffs series. “It’s got nothing to do with the Democrats losing the election. It’s got to do with the way one individual conducts himself, and it’s embarrassing, it’s dangerous to our institutions and what we all stand for and what we expect the country to be. But for this individual, he’s in a game show.”  Read more…

More about Sports, Politics, Nba, Donald Trump, and San Antonio Spurs

The romper is a garment from hell meant to make it harder for women to use the bathroom. But sure, if men want in on stripping down to poop, that’s fine.

A Kickstarter campaign for something called the RompHim was recently launched by a group of dudes marketing the romper as a cool thing men should wear this summer. 

Their versions are, in essence, the Vineyard Vines shorts of rompers, rendered in a splatter paint print and a blue or “red” (read: pink) chambray.

Per RompHim’s Kickstarter page, the dudes behind this project are, of course, friends from business school who, of course, came up with the idea over a round of beers. Read more…

More about Watercooler, Pics, Watercooler, and Pics

Hackers attacked a hospital system with ransomware and demanded $17,000 in bitcoin payment. 

This was not part of the potentially deadly Global WannaCry Ransomware attack that slammed Britain’s National Health Services (NHS) on Friday. It took place over a year ago, and the target was Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Like the NHS, Hollywood Presbyterian chose to pay the ransom so they could quickly regain control of their antiquated systems.

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise for more than a year and, according to Jonathan Penn, Avast Security’s director of strategy, WannaCry could be “just one wave in a very long series.” Read more…

More about Microsoft, Ransomware, Windows 10, Windows 10 S, and Wannacrypt

Everything Tina Fey touches turns to gold, or to an orange-tinged tan beneath a ghastly blonde wig. In The Hollywood Reporter‘s cover story about SNL and American politics, Lorne Michaels revealed that it was Fey who first floated the idea of her one-time 30 Rock co-star.

“She said, ‘Well, the person that should really play [Trump] is Alec’,” Michaels told THR. “And I went, ‘Yeah!’ A light went on.”

In the interview with various members of the show’s cast and production, Baldwin recalls struggling to find his take on Trump while watching hours of footage of him. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Television, Snl, Donald Trump, and Trump

After the Trump administration went nearly hours this weekend without a heart-stopping scandal, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, bravely decided he’d be the one to break the reverie.

On Sunday night, Cohen tweeted a photo of his daughter in lingerie and announced that he was proud of his “Ivy League daughter” for having “beauty and brains.” Normally, a photo like this would cause an uproar, inspiring 10 different Medium posts, an Everyday Feminism explainer and an ethics investigation led by the nation’s chief hallway monitor, Jason Chaffetz.

But because it’s 2017 and this is Trump we’re talking about, Cohen’s photo barely sparked the social media riot it so deeply deserved. Read more…

More about Watercooler, Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, and Watercooler

How did trolls, men’s rights activists, conspiracy theorists, gamergaters, “incels,” neo-Nazis, and a variety of other subcultures end up coming together to engage in one of the most successful disinformation campaigns ever?

A toxic combination of internet savvy, media negligence, and a shared interest in destroying establishment institutions, according to an exhaustive new report from Data & Society. 

“Taking advantage of the opportunity the internet presents for collaboration, communication, and peer production, these groups target vulnerabilities in the news media ecosystem to increase the visibility of and audience for their messages,” wrote Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, authors of the report.  Read more…

More about Alt Right, Fake News, and Business

Pop-Tarts are the grab-and-go breakfast of our childhood. But Pop-Tarts have been pushing the definition of “breakfast” for a while now by offering sugar-laden flavors that seem more appropriate as dessert.

And now Pop-Tarts have departed from breakfast entirely with three newly announced flavors. Hitting stores later this month are Jolly Rancher-flavored Pop-Tarts in three varieties: green apple, cherry, and watermelon.

More about Watercooler, Conversations, Breakfast, Candy, and Kelloggs

After teaching AI to draw and paint with AutoDraw, Google has set its sight on conquering another art form: music

The company’s AI research team, Google Magenta, announced a new project in April called Neural Synthesizer, or NSynth, which generates audio using deep neural networks. That technology will be demonstrated at Durham, North Carolina’s annual arts and technology festival, Moogfest, later this week.

To create music, NSynth uses a dataset containing sounds from individual instruments and then blends them to create hybrid sounds. According to the company, NSynth gives “artists with intuitive control over timbre and dynamics and the ability to explore new sounds that would be difficult or impossible to produce with a hand-tuned synthesizer,” the company said in their announcement. Read more…

More about Google, Music, Research, Ai, and Neural Network