A career in music was not outside the realms of possibility for the young me. My parents split up when I was five, and life at home was a bit mad and sad at times. As the youngest of four children, I craved attention and found it in singing. I’d get picked for all the school plays and church choirs and I liked the reaction I got when I sang. I felt, strangely, that there was a kind of safety in being on stage because I was the one with the mic, the one in control. The first band my friends and I set up was called Give Way because the bass player had pinched a road sign from a junction. I stuck it on the front of my drum set.

I was 29 and mowing the lawn at my mother’s house in Birmingham, Alabama, on a hot day in July 1985 when I looked up and saw two police officers. When my mom saw the handcuffs, she screamed. They asked me whether I owned a firearm, and I said no. They asked if my mother owned one, and I said yes. I asked the detective 50 times why I was being arrested. Eventually, he told me I was being arrested for a robbery. I told him, “You have the wrong man.” He said, “I don’t care whether you did it or not. You will be convicted.”

When it comes to modern storytellers, Shane Black is one of the greats. He burst onto the scene with his script for Lethal Weapon, a classic buddy cop film that would be ripped off for decades to come, and went on to score repeatedly with high-profile, quippy scripts for films like The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Last Action Hero.

On 5 November, John Berger will turn 90. As I travel to Paris to meet him, I carry a bagful of books. There are recently published art historical writings, Portraits, and, to coincide with his 90th birthday, Landscapes (judiciously selected by Tom Overton for Verso), a fascinating series of encounters with the thinkers who have mattered to Berger, from Brecht and Walter Benjamin to Rosa Luxemburg. A marvellous miscellany of more recent work, Confabulations, has just been published by Penguin, and A Jar of Wild Flowers...

Japanese-Americans arrived at a camp in Manzanar, Calif., in March 1942. Amid heated election rhetoric about race and tolerance, Kevin Tsujihara reveals why his mother and father never lost faith in their country: "Today, that sense of belonging is something I want for all of us." Imagine you are a U.S. citizen living in California. One morning you read in the paper, hear in church or see posted on telephone poles that you have two weeks to sell your land and belongings, keeping only what you can carry, and report to a "relocation center."

Skype is the reasons why I can get so many guests on the show. It’s because it’s done all virtually. Let me introduce Jaan Tallinn, one of the original co-founders of Skype. We’re going to be talking about what he’s doing at the moment. It’s related to promoting the study of existential risk. Specifically relating to AI. Imagine! The possibility of the human race not existing in the future. It’s clearly a really important topic. Jaan, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Q. Tell me about your early years. A. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. I spent my formative years under the Soviet state, which wasn’t all that bad, actually. Ukraine is kind of a backwater, so we didn’t really have any of the tension from those days. I had a fairly happy childhood. I grew up in a very cool family — pretty much every person was a scientist. My entire family lived together. My grandmother, my grandfather, my mom and dad, my brother and I all lived in the same apartment, so I got this exposure to two generations of scientists.

In his first interview in 10 years, and with a loaded gun on the coffee table, the legendary former hairdresser turned producer and studio chief opens up about voting for Donald — kept secret from "love of his life" Barbra Streisand — his feud with Peter Guber and how it feels to collect huge paychecks on Superman movies for doing nothing.

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived.

In a playful “Ask Me Anything” session at Reddit.com, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said that he’s interested in visiting Mars someday, but he has some reservations. “Hi Neil!” said one questioner. “Just wanted to know your thoughts on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 relaunch and landing, and what do you think it means for the future of space travel? Also, would you ever consider to join a one way trip to Mars?”

The socialist and filesharing pioneer Peter Sunde is not optimistic about the open internet. "The internet is shit today. It's broken. It was probably always broken, but it's worse than ever." My conversation with Peter Sunde, one of the founders and spokespersons of The Pirate Bay, did not start out optimistically. There's good reason for that: In the last couple of months, the contemporary download culture shows heavy signs of defeat in the battle for the internet.

President Trump during an interview that aired Sunday said he thinks North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a "pretty smart cookie." During an interview that aired on CBS's "Face The Nation," the president was asked what he makes of Kim. Trump said the North Korean leader was a young man when he took over power, adding that he is "dealing with obviously very tough people, in particular the generals and others."

Is this what it was like, Richard Dawkins wonders, for ordinary people in Nazi Germany? “There’s a kind of laziness if you live in a society where things are just accepted. People might have been vaguely uneasy about what was going on in Germany but also thought, ‘Oh well, everyone else is doing it’.”

In June, I got the chance to attend the voice over artist panel at Indiana Comic Con. If you’re not familiar with how these work, the artists come on stage, talk with each other, and then open the microphones up for audience members to ask questions. I was going to pass on asking a question this time, but (lucky me) who should be on the panel but Charles Martinet.

Wells Fargo has already admitted to charging people for overdrawing bank accounts that they didn't have and for car insurance that they didn't need. Now, it's being accused of ripping off vulnerable mom-and-pop businesses. For several years, Wells Fargo's merchant services division overcharged small businesses for processing credit card transactions, a lawsuit alleges. Business owners who tried to leave Wells Fargo were charged "massive early termination fees," according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court.

Imagine a glitzy cinematic sequence where you, as a secret agent, fight your way through an aeroplane soaring through the sky. You're pressing button prompts appearing on the screen while your hero whacks, chops, spins and kicks at the baddie in your way. "You fight all the way down until eventually you beat the guy and rip off his parachute and, I don't know, break his neck, and he floats off and you use his parachute to land."

When dozens of women came forward with sexual assault and harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein—who has continued to deny all allegations of non-consensual sex—actor Terry Crews noticed that some people on Twitter were skeptical. Crews knows from personal experience how hard it is to experience harassment and muster the courage to speak out: He says he was groped by William Morris Endeavor agent Adam Venit at an industry event in front of his wife. The agency said they suspended and demoted Venit, who declined to comment for this article.

It's a security manager's nightmare. Network logs of Internet activity at MassMutual Financial Group indicated a top executive was spending much of his time in chat rooms, where he claimed to have molested his 12-year-old daughter.

When The Exorcist, based on the novel by William Blatty, came to theaters in 1973, it captured the public imagination. Or more accurately, the public's nightmares. Exorcisms aren't just the stuff of horror movies — hundreds of thousands of Italian Catholics reportedly request them each year. But when William Friedkin directed the movie, he'd never actually seen an exorcism. It would be four more decades before he actually witnessed one.

The title of Nine Inch Nails’ new tour, kicking off in Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, is Cold and Black and Infinite. To get here you must pass the tumbling dice, the restless women queuing for the Magic Mike live show, and the inert displays of Johnny Cash memorabilia. It is slightly incongruous, appearing as it does down the street from Backstreet Boys: Larger Than Life and Mariah Carey: The Butterfly Returns, but no less razzle-dazzle in its own way.