Pop Smoke was gunned down by a 15-year-old shooter who ambushed the Brooklyn rapper with a group of teens bent on stealing the singer’s diamond-studded Rolex, a detective testified Friday.

The home intruders also were after the rapper’s Cuban link chain but apparently only managed to swipe the luxury timepiece, which they later resold for $...Read more

Van Morrison has a new album out, and the initial reaction is pretty bad. And that’s not even including allegations of anti-Semitism made against him over a song called “They Own the Media.”

Since the pandemic hit, the “Brown Eyed Girl” singer-songwriter has been railing against lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19, ...Read more

Somewhere along the way, video game companies figured out they could keep monetizing games even after people plunked down the initial purchase price, by offering things like loot boxes or enhancements or pretty much any other in-game purchase someone could dream up. If done right, revenue keeps rolling in.

I love that this specific job ...Read more

Wondering what to watch this week? Check out these film and TV recommendations.

“About Endlessness”

Ah, the merry month of May — perfect for Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s latest and perhaps final musings on what it means to live, suffer, endure. And it’s a comedy! Bone-dry, 76 minutes in length, it comprises meticulous vignettes...Read more

In the TV critic’s version of “you had me at hello,” the HBO Sunday-night drama “Mare of Easttown” had me with the first four images at the start of the series before a word was said.

Refinery tower lights against a predawn sky. A weather-beaten, ramshackle, frame house. A cemetery. Strings of almost identical, rundown row houses ...Read more

Ziwe has always loved asking people questions. Maybe a little too much.

"That was something I was penalized for in school — like, I was annoying," says the comedian in a video chat. "But now it serves a purpose."

The 29-year-old New Yorker is known for her frank, funny conversations about sensitive issues, especially race. It all began with ...Read more

For more than a year, I've kept a folder on my desk that was stuffed full of scribbled notes for the story I was working on when the pandemic hit. Every journalist, it seems, has a version of this folder — ideas rendered moot by the arrival of our global calamity.

The story, about the architecture of libraries, was also a story about how ...Read more

When sun-baked rock star Jimmy Buffett announced his first live performances in more than a year would take place next week on Delray Beach’s Old School Square, the Jimmy-sphere went coconuts.

The full allotment of 3,552 seats for his four outdoor concerts on May 13-14, 17-18, sold in four-person pods that started at $450 each, were gone in ...Read more

One could be tempted to think that "Black Feminist Video Game" is taking some liberties with the interactive medium, especially once the game within the livestream play begins and the lead character of this Center Theatre Group presentation engages in a real-time conversation. The screen shifts from a computerized image to that of a real-life ...Read more

LOS ANGELES – In late 2017, ICM Partners CEO Chris Silbermann announced an audacious pledge: achieve gender parity in leadership positions and on the board by 2020.

It was part of a larger industry-wide effort called "50/50 by 2020," championed by prominent ICM client Shonda Rhimes and others in the wake of Hollywood's reckoning over sexual ...Read more

Written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2011′s “Contagion” hit No. 10 on the iTunes movie rental chart a year ago in January. In those early moths of the pandemic, audiences were suddenly seeking out a nearly decade-old thriller depicting a fictional pandemic bearing a resemblance the COVID-19 outbreak of the past year...Read more

It may be the most famous broadside launched by a government official in American history:

Sixty years ago this Sunday, Newton N. Minow invited the television executives gathered in Washington for his first official speech as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to spend a day watching their own broadcasts.

"Keep your eyes glued ...Read more

Sure, being a sex worker on 42nd St. during the 1970s was tough — but so is life as a modern-day actress.

Emily Meade, who starred as doomed prostitute Lori Madison on HBO’s “The Deuce,” says she hasn’t been able to land a gig since the drama series ended two years ago.

The 32-year-old actress posted a photo of herself on Instagram ...Read more

Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man” has a proper opening credits sequence, with classical illustrations of angels, lions and other dramatic Biblical scenes juxtaposed over slow-motion images of anguished men, bass strings groaning relentlessly. It’s time for some heavy-duty masculine myth-making melodrama, a fable of men, guns, tragedy and ...Read more

The catchy, syrupy-sweet tunes from the female pop stars of the late '90s and early '00s were once described by some as a major step toward female empowerment: Britney Spears showing the world how a young woman could own her sexuality, or the Spice Girls championing the power of female friendship.

But in retrospect, these acts' shiny surfaces ...Read more

Middle age hasn't been kind to the members of the girl band Girls5Eva. Wickie, the diva of the one-hit-wonder group, is paying the bills by shooting geese at an airport. Summer misses her celebrity husband so much that she purchases a Cameo greeting from him. Gloria's current claim to fame is that she's one-half of New York's first gay divorce. ...Read more