Bill Hanstock

Get ready for the best school field trip ever. Twenty thousand New York City students will get to see Lin-Manuel Miranda's genius musical, Hamilton, on Broadway. The Rockefeller Foundation is giving the NYC Deprtment of Education a $1.46 million grant, which will allow students to go at the "Ham4Ham" lottery ... More »

For the next three weeks, Vulture is holding a High-School-TV Showdown to determine the greatest teen show of the past 30 years. We began with the Fug Girls picking Buffy the Vampire Slayer over Dawson's Creek. In honor of today’s loser, Vulture caught up with former Dawson's showrunner Greg Berlanti to get the ... More »

For the next three weeks, Vulture is holding a High-School-TV Showdown to determine the greatest teen show of the past 25 years. Each day, a different notable writer will be charged with determining the winner of a round of the bracket, until New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz judges the finals ... More »

While fans continue to mourn the loss of NBC’s brilliant Hannibal, Bryan Fuller has moved on to other projects. Not only is he at work on adapting Neil Gaiman's bestselling American Gods, but, as Deadline reports, Fuller is now returning to NBC to revive a short-lived anthology show from the ... More »

Jeb Bush seems like he might be pretty nerdy, but on Wednesday night he revealed that he's the kind of nerd who likes discussing the nuances of school vouchers and the deregulation of federal land, not the type who makes Star Trek jokes and posts a photo of himself standing ... More »

Deadline reports that a reboot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show will air on Fox in fall 2016, celebrating the film's 40th anniversary. Laverne Cox is set to star as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the role portrayed by Tim Curry in the film. Coming off the heels of the original film's cast ... More »

Original TV content isn't looking profitable over at Yahoo, which released an overall weak third quarter earnings report Tuesday. The tech giant's CFO Ken Goldman told reporters over the phone that the company's video division specifically took a huge (read: $42 million) hit — namely thanks to such under-performing series ... More »

ATLANTA—Struggling in vain to free himself from the sticky vessel, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was reportedly forced to attend a campaign fundraiser Tuesday with his head stuck firmly inside a crock of molasses. “I’d love to tell y’all ’bout how Obama’s done let the Arabs run buck-wild ’round the Middle East, but I seem to have got myself into a whole hog’s heap of trouble here,” said Huckabee, his remarks to donors muffled by the ceramic container that slowly trickled dark brown liquid over his neck and shoulders. “It’s past time we had a president who could tell the difference ’tween a tater and a tax plan, and if I weren’t stickier than a possum in pine tar, I’d be fixin’ to shake y’all’s hands for tossin’ a whole mess of money my way.” At press time, sources confirmed ...

By far the scariest, most monstrous, haunting image from last night's The Walking Dead is Carl's horrible emo shag haircut. Death would be preferable to this hair, Carl.Remember when Carl was just wearing that big hat and playing with guns?Also ruining everything and never being where he was supposed to ... More »

After years of the will-they-won't-they rumor mill, Edina Monsoon and Patsy Stone are officially heading to the big screen: Fox and BBC Films have released the first photo of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, and judging from the photo and log line, we're in store for a lot of alcohol-and-nicotine-fueled fun. The film, adapted ... More »

The upcoming We Love Disney compilation album has gathered a cornucopia of musicians to cover the most cherished Disney tunes — everyone from Ariana Grande to Fall Out Boy to Jessi Ware has lent their vocal chops to the sing-along extravaganza, out October 30. The latest preview to the album comes from country ... More »

i don’t have to put any text here, the title is good enough. time to call it a day

have a great weekend

For a few inspiring hours Thursday afternoon, pizza rat finally got the recognition he deserved.The rat's seconds-long struggle to drag a piece of pizza down some subway stairs made him a hero to the city's struggling millennials, who already celebrated his efforts with a viral YouTube video, many copy-rat videos, and ... More »

Marvel announced today that Ant-Man and the Wasp, a sequel to Ant-Man that will reunite Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily), will be released on July 6, 2018. Director Peyton Reed (who helmed Ant-Man) also shared the news via Twitter, suggesting he will return for the second installment. In ... More »

Game of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer is pretty chill. This is clear from the fact that someone at New York Comic Con asked her about her resemblance to Denise, Kermit's new girlfriend on The Muppets. Denise is a pig. Natalie Dormer was asked about her resemblance to a pig. Here's ... More »

I’m still waiting for Eli Roth to make a good movie. But for the first thirty or forty minutes of Knock Knock, I thought maybe this was the one. It starts off well, with a camera gliding over the Hollywood hills and locating the well-appointed, sheltered home of forty-something architect Evan ... More »

A serial killer has plagued Days of Our Lives for weeks, strangling people with (don't laugh) neckties. While most of the victims have been far from fan favorites, consisting mostly of people that needed to be culled from the cast, today the killer claimed a surprising victim — Will Horton. ... More »

Liza Minnelli was on her way to play a show in Wilmington, North Carolina, last weekend when her flight hit unexpected turbulence and had to turn back to Charlotte. The BBC reports that, rather than disappoint the generations of Cabaret and Arrested Development fans who had paid good money to ... More »

Go grab a piece of cherry pie to console yourself. As if Twin Peaks fans needed more bad news: It's been confirmed that Michael Ontkean will not be reprising his role as Harry S. Truman, the soft-spoken and unlucky-with-love sheriff of the kooky Washington town, for the show's upcoming revival on Showtime. ... More »

i have commented on comments before

there’s no such thing as just reading anymore — passively absorbing information being presented to you — without an invitation to voice your opinion. i can’t even be alone in goddamned books anymore. a dotted underline appears: “153 people highlighted this,” the kindle tells me. why on earth would that matter to me. get out of my book

comment sections have value as avenues for discussion as long as discussion actually can occur there. youtube still has comments, but they could be replaced site-wide with a picture of a small horse, and be of greater service to its users. sometimes you need to know what a horse looks like. how many legs, etc.

the bleated message of the internet is: everything that pops into your head is important. your most fleeting thought matters every bit as much as what you just read. your hottest possible take needs to be made visible this instant.

i want conversation, exchange, analysis, thought, dissection. i want discourse. but we live in a post-discourse society. “i read this article” is a modern colloquialism which means “i saw most of the words in this headline.”

we need to be exposed to opposing views. it rounds us as people. it tests our arguments, and allows us to rethink or discard bad ones. but in such a landscape, purposefully-truncated methods of communication — the tweet, the status update, the collapsible comment — become 140-character lathes to sharpen existing beliefs to little points, to jab at someone else with, who then prepare their own pointy stick in rebuttal

at some sad point on the curve, comments are just a way to drive up pageviews

but what do you believe? sound off below!

Nearly a decade ago, if you can believe it, Taylor Swift brought a new sound and a younger audience to country music. She's since left country's green pastures for pop's city streets, but a trail of young guns — like Kacey Musgraves, Sam Hunt, Kelsea Ballerini, and Maddie & Tae, ... More »

It shouldn't have taken this long for someone to think of combining the works of Kanye West and Weezer, and yet here we are. Some 19-year-old out of Ohio State University (who just discovered how good "old Weezer" used to be, sigh) has finally put two and two together. Inspired ... More »

Though typically known for portraying some seriously badass women onscreen, it turns out Sigourney Weaver is a total boss in real life, too. On Friday night, Weaver sat down with film critic Anthony Lane at the New Yorker Festival, and recounted one particularly bold interaction she had with President Ronald ... More »

ABC is looking to add another comic-book series to its roster to go with Agent Carter and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. But this one doesn't revolve around superheroics — it's based on the people who have to clean up after superheroes. Damage Control is a comic book about the construction ... More »

The poor, maligned runt that is True Detective season two just keeps getting kicked around. Season one director Cary Fukunaga hasn't watched it, while a number of directors, from William Friedkin to Andrew Dominik, reportedly turned down an invite to direct. Now we can add another name to that list. Speaking ... More »

If you read 'em long enough, you'll find more than a fair share of tone-deaf, dumb-ass comic book story titles, and no, I wouldn't even dare count the class Stan Lee-isms like "And Lo — There Shall Come an Ending!" (Part 3 of Five). No, let's reserve this feature for the worst of the worst, the cheesiest, the corniest, the stupidest titles in comics. Titles like this watersogged "classic:"


Splash page from "There Are No Wire Hangers Underwater!" in Iron Man Annual (1976 series) #10 (September 1989), script by Fabian Nicieza, pencils by Don Perlin, inks by Don Ald, colors by T. Fine, letters by Rick Parker
It's only 1989, which means that I can't use my What can we say? It was the nineties tag. You can pretty much agree that the nineties began in the eighties, however, what with the introduction of chrominum covers, Venom, Batman: The Killing Joke, and the New Teen Titans' Danny Chase. Also: the beginning of single-story mega-crossover events in comics annuals, which will eventually lead to Eclipso: The Darkness Within, The Terminus Factor, JLApe, and perhaps the world's worst summer event since the invention of that ice cream van song: Bloodlines. But it all started here in 1989's Atlantis Attacks, in which former President Jimmy Carter, media mogul Ted Turner, and redneck comic Jeff Foxworthy waged war against the entire Marvel Universe…oh, excuse me, I've made another one of my silly mistakes. That's Atlanta Attacks.

Anyway, "There Are No Wire Hangers Underwater!" continues the saga of true blue Atlantean Andromeda, former member of the Defenders and future member of the underwater heroic team named (groan) "Deep Six." I was fairly sure that she was a member of the Avengers during the hazy, please-try-to-forget-them latter years of Avengers Volume 1, circa Deathcry and Teen Tony Stark, but I was wrong. That's how memorable Andromeda is: she wasn't in the worst years of the Avengers.

But she is returning home to Atlantis pretty much concurrent with it attacking, since beloved bare-torsoed fishy king Namor is believed to be dead, floating face down on the surface of the ocean. Not so: Namor would be non-dead for many more years until finally meeting his fate in that epic battle against the Gorton's Fisherman in 2012's limited series Namor No More. Also not realistic: that weirdass, appearently waterproof version of the Times of London, which in real life doesn't look anything like it's portrayed in this panel. For one thing, there's no crispy and delivious fish 'n' chips wrapped inside it.


Andromeda, wearing the world's least aero- water-dynamic boots, is determined to find out the villain behind the plot of Atlantis Attacks! But since she can't find Tom DeFalco, she's going to confront her own Daddie Dearest, the fearsome Attuma! Or as she calls him: the clam behind the madness. I dunno, I woulda gone with "the clam before the storm." But I'm shellfish that way.


The (stupid!) title of the story is a reference to the 1981 cult classic movie Mommie Dearest, and I'm pretty sure including Joan Crawford in this not-entirely-Iron Man story would have improved it immensely.


Instead, we get Andromeda's dad and Namor nemesis Attuma. I haven't read the rest of this story, serialized across several issues of Atlantis Attacks, but I'm just betting one of the sequels is titled "Attuma with a View."


Thus follows the most anti-climatic battle in the history of Iron Man Annual #10: Andromeda confronts Attuma, Attuma threatens Andromeda, Attuma gets all creepy, Andromeda runs swims away. Also, he insults Andromeda's mom (Andmomeda?) Lady Gelva by calling her a sea cow. I dunno, for some reason I myself don't see that as a insult, personally.


TO BE CONTINUED! In X-Factor #4.


X-Factor Annual #4 is pretty cool because it has artwork by Walt Simonson and John Byrne, an appearance by Jake and Elwood Blues…


Panels from "Inferno Aftermath" in X-Factor Annual #4 (September 1989), script by Mark Gruenwald, pencils by Jim Fern, inks by Joe Rubinstein, colors by Greg Wright, letters by Joe Rosen
...but best yet, it doesn't actually contain a continuation of the Andromeda story. Thus not giving us exactly what we don't want! Hooray for comics!

LOS GATOS, CA—Saying that everyone, including all 65 million of its subscribers, really ought to see the film at least once, Netflix announced Tuesday that it will suspend all streaming content except Hard Eight for a full month.

Officials from the online video subscription service, which boasts a library of tens of thousands of movies and TV shows in addition to the first feature film by acclaimed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, told reporters they will temporarily remove all other titles from the website and devote 100 percent of their server capacity to the 1996 neo-noir drama.

“We want to make sure every one of our members watches this thrilling character study of a veteran gambler and his young protégé, so for the entire month of October, Hard Eight will be the only video available on the entire site,” said chief content officer Ted Sarandos, who, upon discovering only a ...

Few are making better synth-pop right now than Chvurches, who know a thing or two about how to pull off a good cover. With their killer sophomore album, Every Open Eye, out Friday, Lauren Mayberry & Co. stopped by BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge for another memorable reworking. This time ... More »