Have you noticed that new feature on YouTube where, once you’ve finished watching a video, a 10-second countdown begins, after which a new video of YouTube’s choosing automatically starts? This audience-retention stratagem was introduced experimentally late last year for randomly targeted users, and apparently it was successful enough to become the new norm. YouTube’s “autoplay”…

After 17 years of Leno and Letterman, our crucial late-night television talk shows are in an unusual state of flux: in the past 14 months, Jimmy Fallon has taken over “The Tonight Show,” Seth Meyers has taken over “Late Night,” Stephen Colbert has transferred from “The Colbert Report” to “The Late Show,” Chelsea Handler has…

If you’re like me, you never watch regular-season college basketball, and then when the NCAA tournament rolls around and nobody can talk about anything else, you have to root arbitrarily for certain teams and against others, since you have no idea who the players are on either team or what they’re like. Yet it strikes…

In the immediate aftermath of the courtroom verdict that awarded $7.4 million of the profits from the 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” to the family of Marvin Gaye (whose 1977 single “Got to Give It Up” was allegedly plagiarized), two distinct groups of commentators formed. On the one hand, countless “experts”—lawyers, journalists, musicians, musicologists—emerged with articles…

“Saturday Night Live” recently did a sketch that mocked Kanye West’s latest awards show-related apology, which came two and a half weeks after Kanye rose in protest at the Grammys when alt-rock legend Beck beat out R&B star Beyoncé for Album of the Year. The begrudgingly contrite tweet was funny in part because it came…

What do you do when you’ve already watched all the good movies on Netflix Instant? Reevaluate your life, maybe? No, you move on to the digital movie library at Amazon Instant Video. Like Netflix, Amazon.com offers a subscription service for unlimited streaming access to a collection of thousands of movies and TV shows, including its…

Do you make your bed in the morning? And if not, do you think you’re a terrible human being? I myself do not make the bed. Since I don’t enjoy doing chores, I do them only as necessary—and making the bed has always struck me as perhaps the most useless of all the prescribed “daily…