What a trip it's been. Back in 2013, when a little team that was working out of a busted-up old studio they shared with a taxi rank on a small street in Guildford revealed its follow-up to a series of cute cartoon racing game, it was one of those moments. No Man's Sky captured the world's attention like few other games have before it. And for three years No Man's Sky was given the world's stage, making headline appearances at E3 conferences and with creator Sean Murray guesting on big-name US talk shows.

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944...

“Fascism” is a word that gets tossed around pretty loosely these days, usually as an epithet to discredit someone else’s politics. One consequence is that no one really knows what the term means anymore. Liberals see fascism as the culmination of conservative thinking: an authoritarian, nationalist, and racist system of government organized around corporate power. For conservatives, fascism is totalitarianism masquerading as the nanny state.

Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, said he "sold my users' privacy" when Facebook acquired the company. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock in 2014, its biggest acquisition ever. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit," Acton told Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

AnchorFree — the company behind the popular VPN app Hotspot Shield — recently surveyed its users, asking them when they cared about privacy and security. And when it came to most of their activity online, like sharing photos to Facebook, the survey respondents said they didn’t care. “But 30 percent of the time, almost everyone said they cared about their privacy enormously,” AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. “That 30 percent was when it came to things like your healthcare, your finances and your family.”

Analytical as ever, the comic has strong opinions about disgraced peers like Cosby. He says the audience is always right (even about his #MeToo joke).

Actor Sean Bean has played many roles where his character dies before the end of the film or TV series and now gamers have the chance to digitally kill him when he appears as a special guest star target in the video game Hitman 2. The Hitman games cast the player as Agent 47 who can employ a wide range of weapons to kill his target.

I recently visited Obsidian Entertainment to see the studio's new RPG The Outer Worlds, which I called a blend of Firefly and Fallout. It may look like the space cowboy version of Bethesda's recent Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, but its roots run deeper than that: lead developers Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain created Fallout together in the 90s, along with other famous PC RPGs like Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

God of War is the result of the labors of 300 people at console industry leader Sony’s studio in Santa Monica, California. Yet it was the underdog in the battle for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, as Red Dead Redemption 2 was built by a team at Rockstar Games with 10 times more resources. Even so, God of War was the surprise Game of the Year winner, even though it came out in April, long before the fall games that were fresh in everyone’s mind during the holiday season.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

Humans in many different venues use and often seriously abuse nonhuman animals (animals) by the billions. I recently learned of an interesting study published in PLOS ONE by Danish researchers Thomas Bøker Lund, Sara Vincentzen Kondrup, and Peter Sandøe called "A multidimensional measure of animal ethics orientation–Developed and applied to a representative sample of the Danish public...

George Harrison was miserable from frame one to frame 500,” says Ethan Russell. “He was so over it. I don’t think he did anything but scowl for three hours.” The photographer is recalling the day he unknowingly took the last ever shot of the Beatles together. It was 22 August 1969, and they were all at John Lennon’s countryside estate near Ascot. “Paul was trying to hold it together,” he adds. “He had his arms crossed like, ‘Come on, lads!’ But the concept of the Beatles just didn’t sync with who they were any more.

R. Kelly appeared to be physically restrained during an emotional television interview in which he tearfully and angrily denied accusations that he raped underage girls in his first interview since his indictment last month. 'Quit playing, I didn’t do this stuff,' the pop singer tearfully told Gayle King of CBS News on Tuesday. ‘This is not me. I’m fighting for my f*****g life.’ King posted a photo on her Instagram showing moments from her sit-down with R. Kelly.

What he does care a great deal about is acting and movies (and golf—he is coy about his handicap but acknowledges it lies in low single digits), and he approaches his craft with both a childlike love for the medium and a specialist’s obsession with technique. This combination has led him to enjoy one of the most prolific film careers of any actor alive, despite his relatively late-in-life big break. Perhaps only Nicolas Cage comes close to achieving Jackson’s ability to pop up across a pantheon of wildly disparate title...

Contrary to popular belief, not all philosophers are nerds. Nor are all nerds philosophers. I am living proof of that, since I was a nerd long before I was a philosopher. I played Dungeons & Dragons, I got good grades, I edited the school newspaper and was on the debate team. Imagine one of the kids from Stranger Things, but not heroic.

Ahead of 'Avengers: Endgame,' the progressive Captain America actor and Twitter firebrand says he's ready to retire his Marvel hero for directing gigs, a new Apple show and the fight against the "dumb s—" president: “I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up.”

Dave Grohl has reflected on hearing Nirvana for the first time, remembering listening to their music well before he even joined the group. It’s a little hard to imagine, but there was in fact a time in which Nirvana didn’t feature the now-legendary Dave Grohl as their drummer. Their longest-tenured drummer, Grohl was the final entrant in a string of five percussionists that Nirvana boasted between 1987 and 1990.

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss discuss the final season of their blockbuster HBO series in a deep-dive, spoiler-free conversation. Below are new behind-the-scenes insights about creating the hugely anticipated final six episodes of the global fantasy hit as the Emmy-winning duo discuss writing the finale, the season’s massive battle episode, author George R.R. Martin’s contribution, fears about spoiler leakage, their favorite scenes, and their rare arguments amid an obsessive drive to create the best possible drama. (Note: A few of these quotes were previously published in EW’s season 8 cover stories.)

Telltale, the adventure-game juggernaut known for games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, shuttered late last year in a shocking and abrupt fashion. Speculation erupted through the games industry, with many wondering what circumstances led to the closure.

Dollar figures can be misleading. That was the disheartening lesson learned by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild, in 2003 with her debut novel, Torch. Despite receiving a sizable-seeming advance for the book, she remained deeply in debt for years — even as Wild, her subsequent memoir, landed on the best-seller list, Strayed and her husband, documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, struggled to pay the rent.