Big Leak Reveals the OnePlus 8's Design and Specs Ahead of Launch

Recently, OnePlus has started hyping up its next big phone—the OnePlus 8. And now, a big leak has just revealed a ton of critical info about the design and features of OnePlus’ next flagship handset.

Based on official-looking product renders and specs discovered by noted leaker Roland Quandt and German site Winfuture.de, it seems OnePlus is going bold with the color options on the OnePlus 8....

The Unashamed Empathy of Literature's Original Horse Girl

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) is not often a novel that comes to mind when we think about Victorian literature. There are no youths entangled in agonized romantic longing, nor plucky orphans determined to distinguish themselves in a rapidly industrializing London, nor labyrinthine mysteries surrounding inherited wealth or parentage. No wives are imprisoned in attics (thank goodness), and...

Melt Anchovies Into Butter and Put That Butter in Everything

Since canned food is having a big moment, I’d say now is the time to reconsider the humble canned anchovy. They have a reputation for being overwhelmingly fishy and salty—and those rumors aren’t exactly untrue—but they also possess a deep minerality and ton of umami. When melted into butter (or olive oil), you can harness the little fish’s intense nature to bring a wallop of flavor to any...

Liberty University Reopens and to the Surprise of No One With a Brain, Students Start Getting Sick

Is it really that hard to err on the side of caution during a crisis? Doesn’t that seem like the bare minimum that can be done to keep the general public safe until the threat of a global pandemic passes?

Well, Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. didn’t appear to believe so when he made the decision to reopen his school last week, risking the health of the...

We can only hope this cover of Joe Exotic's "I Saw A Tiger" is the first of many

Joe Exotic, if the Netflix docuseries Tiger King is anything to go by, is a terrible person . Aside from the obvious issues with keeping wild animals captive for profit, Joe seems to have emotionally and physically manipulated his husbands with drugs and probably put a hit out on his big cat world nemesis, Carole Baskin. And yet, just like other famous musically-inclined scumbags Charles...

Trump's Sexism Is Going to Get People Killed in Michigan

President Trump is waging war against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She fits the qualifications of the ideal Trump villain: She’s a Democrat, she’s a woman, and she declines to show the same deference towards him as most of his sycophants. But Trump’s disdain toward Whitmer isn’t just run-of-the-mill hostility and pettiness unfolding for public consumption; it’s a form of gendered...

Devil in disguise: Who's inside Charlotte Hale's head on Westworld?

Westworld is playing a different game in season three—Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s sci-fi drama (née Western) is much more forthcoming in its storytelling, and more restrained in its number of timelines and perspective-shifting flashbacks. As Zack Handlen notes in his review of the third episode, “The Absence Of Field ,” the series has “reinvented itself; in leaving the park, it’s...

Join the co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a live watch party of the first movie today

It’s Monday, in case that wasn’t immediately clear—and hey, no judgment here. The days and hours are all blurring together, there are only so many puzzles to do, and even Netflix has begun to lose its allure. Thankfully, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman has an exciting opportunity if you can just hang in there until this afternoon: a live watch party to celebrate the 30th...

Locusts Are Ravaging the Horn of Africa—Covid-19 Is Making Things Worse

For months, hundreds of millions of locusts have been flying across East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, forming the largest swarms seen in decades. New swarms are continuing to spread from Kenya to Iran, and the worst swarms—those over the Horn of Africa—are multiplying quickly.

The bugs pose an unprecedented threat to nutrition and health in the region, which faces...

End the longest month in history with a free taco

We’re in an era that demands small comforts, and if you’re looking to do yourself a tiny kindness this week, then treating your belly to a free taco with a Nacho Cheese Dorito shell certainly qualifies.

On Friday, Taco Bell CEO Mark King announced via open letter some of the company’s initiatives to aid the ongoing fight against COVID-19. First, it’s expanding safety procedures and social...

Red Bull Motorsport Adviser Had Dumb Idea To Infect Team's Drivers With COVID-19

A couple of weeks ago, when a lot of details about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, still weren’t fully understood, a theory that mass infection could lead to mass immunization was going around. Now that we’ve seen how potentially deadly the virus can be, though, we now know that’s a really stupid idea.

The...

How's It Going?: Bummer Edition

It’s Monday. Can you believe they’re still making Mondays? Welcome back to our daily open thread.

My foster dog got adopted this weekend, far too soon for my tastes. I begged my landlord to let me permanently adopt her, but he wouldn’t go for it. I’m happy for the dog and for her new person, but it was super sad to let her go. (Why did no one warn me fostering animals would be sad?) I had kind...

He Terrorized Poor Black Women for Decades. Now, California's 'Grim Sleeper' Is Dead

Lonnie Franklin Jr., the convicted serial killer nicknamed “The Grim Sleeper,” was found dead in his prison cell this weekend in California’s San Quentin Prison.

The 67-year-old, who is believed to have killed at least 10 women over the span of 30 years, was found unresponsive in his cell on Saturday night, reports CNN. According to a press release from the California Department of...

Hurricane Season lets loose a tempest of superstition and violence in small-town Mexico

It begins with the most tired of clichés: the body of a dead woman. Five children make the discovery near a river one hot afternoon, smelling the corpse before they see its “dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes.” But the associations the trope stirs up—a serial killer on the loose, an obsessive detective pinning photographs to a cork board—are not just absent from Hurricane...

Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf Tests Positive For Covid-19

Tech pioneer Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the modern internet, has tested positive for covid-19, according to a tweet Cerf sent out Monday morning. The 76-year-old tweeted out a clip from HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the U.S. response to the global pandemic.

“I tested positive for COVID-19 and am recovering,” Cerf tweeted. “Listen to what John Oliver has to say about...

It’s Time for America to Do the Right Thing and Quarantine Trump’s Press Conferences

On Sunday, the president of people who didn’t wash their hands before the coronavirus and probably still don’t held a rally disguised as a press conference in which he rated questions on a scale of nice and ugly, berated a reporter for quoting him and continued to lie to the American public about what he did and didn’t do during a global pandemic.

And because he’s a fucking egomaniac, he’s...

Watch John Krasinski and Steve Carell reminisce about The Office in quarantine

Now that digital communications are all the rage, the quarantined masses are reconnecting with the friends and former colleagues once lost to time and proximity. That’s true for the celebs, too, apparently, as Hollywood beefcake John Krasinski used his new good-news-only YouTube show to have a chat with his old Office co-star Steve Carell. Now that A Quiet Place 2 has been delayed , he’s got...

Net Art of the Day: JODI

The covid-19 museum closures have made abundantly clear that accession committees and the web’s corporate overlords don’t have much love for net art. While museums spent the past decade and hundreds of millions of dollars colonizing the earth and sky to make space for hoards of painting and sculpture, the web’s billboard-plastered renovations have threatened to steamroll it into oblivion....

Resident Evil 3: The Kotaku Review

About five minutes into the Resident Evil 3 remake, I uttered the word “brilliant.” I don’t use that word often. I don’t know if I should have used it then. Brilliance is an incredibly rare thing, and Resident Evil 3 hooked me from the start. It is an explosive game brimming with intensity and some of the best action in the series. If you’re looking for a moody horror experience, this isn’t...

Host a Virtual Lunch for Your Kids and Their Friends

If you ask a kid, any kid, what their favorite part of the school day is, you’re likely to get one of two answers: Recess or lunch. Which means, while many kids probably aren’t pining for a good old fashioned math or social studies lesson right now, they do miss running around together outside and chatting in the lunchroom.

There’s not a whole lot we can do about the recess part of that...