The Silk Road trial has only been going on for two weeks, and already it’s had its fair share of drama: There have been setups by the prosecution, accusations and alternative theories tossed out by the defense, and, yes, selfies. Motherboard’s Kari Paul has been at the trial every day of the week, and our reporters have been covering Silk […]
If you see the words “copyright” and “law” juxtaposed next to each other, and your eyes glaze over, we don’t necessarily blame you. But copyright law is insane, and a wonderful, constant source of nutty human interest cases that explore every part of art, culture, and greediness. This week on Radio Motherboard, we invited the Electronic Frontier […]
The first season of the ultra-popular podcast Serial is over, but lots of questions remain, in no small part due to the lack of evidence tying then-high school student Adnan Syed to the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Huge swaths of Sarah Koenig’s longform storytelling (and reporting) experiment are dedicated to frustratingly minute details of what cell […]
In her filmmaking, the director Laura Poitras—my guest on this edition of Radio Motherboard—likes to document reality as it happens, those moments of uncertainty that often don’t appear on film. “There’s something about how we look at the past which has a kind of finality and closure to it, where life doesn’t usually happen that way,” she told me. […]
Interstellar may not be a great film—then again, it might be—but it does cut to the heart of quite a few of the themes we regularly hit on here at Motherboard: Space colonization, ecological collapse, near and far future dystopias, theoretical physics, the enduring power of love. Maybe not so much that last one, but […]
The news was tailor made to dominate the media: Sony had been hacked, deeply, by a group calling themselves ‘Guardians of Peace’, possibly a squad of North Koreans. Social security numbers, bank records, unreleased movies, company wages, and embarrassing Power Points all spilled out of what was quickly labeled the biggest corporate hack in history. So this week on […]
Tomorrow, most of us will probably, at some point, sit down with their friends and/or family, have a few drinks, catch up, and oh yeah, eat some food. There’s a very good chance that the food you eat will be, well, food. Chances are it’ll consist of some mix of turkey, tofurkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, […]