By Justin Sanders
[All photos courtesy of Julian Fort] When we last spoke with Julian Fort, in September of 2018, he had recently completed his first feature film, The Midnighters. With a powerful lead performance from Leon Russom (The Big Lebowski), the indie thriller made the most of its shoestring budget and has... Read more
By Justin Sanders
The world’s most powerful internet platforms are even more powerful, and more dangerous, than ever. It sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Trapped in our homes during the time of coronavirus, we are more reliant on companies like Google and Facebook than ever before. So their continued failures to address their... Read more
By Ruth Vitale
Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. His office began 2020 by announcing a year-long series of hearings to assess the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 22 years after its passage. Senator Tillis, thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed.... Read more
By Ruth Vitale
Representative Hank Johnson, of Georgia, is Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet. Representative Johnson, thank you for agreeing to answer questions for our new Heroes on the Hill series of Q&A’s. Given your position as the Chair of the IP Subcommittee, we wanted to... Read more
By Justin Sanders
[All photos by Kent Meister] Much has changed in the world since we spoke with Katie Irish in June of 2018. Back then, Irish had just wrapped up the job of lead costume designer on FX’s acclaimed series The Americans – and was looking toward the future with both excitement... Read more
By Justin Sanders
Another Slamdance Film Festival has come and gone, and with it, another winner of the CreativeFuture Innovation Award. This year’s winner, Polish filmmaker Barbara Rupik, has a primordial, ancient quality in her approach to visuals and narrative, despite still being a student at the National Film School in Lodz. Her winning film, The... Read more
In early March, before COVID-19 changed the world, VICE published an irresponsible piece of “journalism” headlined “Gen Z Is Leading a New Wave of Internet Piracy”. Now that we’ve settled into our quarantine routine, we want to talk about how bad it is. VICE’s piece, written by Canadian “author” Sarah Hagi,... Read more
By Justin Sanders
It was a dark and stormy night when the online forum r/nosleep closed its doors to the general public. The horror story-themed Reddit forum (known as a “subreddit”) had built a massive following by curating some of the scariest tales on the internet. Its authors had a gift for the spine-tingling detail... Read more
By Ruth Vitale
Stop us if you have heard this one before: a Google-funded organization has cited Google-backed research to spout misleading piracy claims that benefit Google. This time, the guilty party is Re:Create, a purported coalition of “Innovators, Creators and Consumers United for Balanced Copyright.” They started circulating a “fact” sheet titled Copyright Infringement on the... Read more
By Justin Sanders
With their expressive visuals and cartoony speech bubbles, comic books offer the breeziest of reading pleasures, even when the material is dark or heavy. But don’t mistake “breezy” for “easy.” In their acclaimed comic book series, Crowded, the self-described, British-born “comics line art duo” of Ro Stein and Ted Brandt flex an illustrative panache so... Read more