Slate
Staff writer for Slate
PROFILE
Amanda Hess
Guest
FROM Amanda Hess
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
Are ‘experience’ museums only for Instagram and nothing else? Two new pop-up “experience” museums opened in the LA area this week. There’s Cheat Day Land, where you can lift donut dumbbells, swim in a cereal bowl, and pose in front of murals of chocolate cake. At “The Pizza Experience” in Pasadena, you can go into a pizza nightclub, and sit on a pizza box throne. Instagram is flooded with photos of people at these kinds of museums. New York Times critic Amanda Hess spent the whole summer visiting these pop-up museums. She says the experience nearly broke her. KCRW's Anna Scott and her husband at the Museum of Ice Cream. Photo courtesy of Scott.
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
What makes HQ Trivia so addictive? Everyone seems to be playing HQ Trivia. It’s like a pop quiz game on your phone, and you can only play during certain times of the day. We find out why people love to hate it but play anyway, and how it helped one tech writer stop smoking.
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
Sony Hack, One Year Later One year ago today, everything changed at Sony . The entertainment company was hacked, probably by North Korea, in retaliation for the Seth Rogen movie The Interview. The computers in the office didn’t work. Troves of data disappeared, like salary information and internal phone numbers. And an avalanche of leaked emails between top executives and Hollywood names like Angelina Jolie and Aaron Sorkin went online. The media, of course, had a field day. But for the rank-and-file employees at Sony, the days after hack were harrowing. What’s the situation one year later?
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LA Observed
Where the fire started, a checkered past The Woolsey Fire continues to rage at a little more than a third containment today. Areas in, and north and west of, Malibu are feeling the brunt of the impact. But across the Ventura County Line, headed past Point Mugu, and toward Oxnard, is a plot of land that has a lot of history. And controversy. With fires burning inside the grounds of the former Rocketdyne Field Lab, some folks who live nearby are worried.