The Outline

With a handshake for a contract and a flat fee, a prominent realist painter created a problem that still bothers him at the end of his long successful career.

Kelly Conaboy DNA-tests her rescue dog, Peter Parker in a bid to silence a know-it-all, loudmouth schnook at the dog park who thinks he can deduce Peter’s canine heritage at a glance. In Peter’s results, Conaboy gets a pleasant surprise.

The production of big-name, high-budget games increasingly relies on outsourcing (or “external development,” if you prefer) for the creation of 3D art, level design, and other game assets. Michael Thomsen visited one of the firms that provides this work, the Shanghai-headquartered Virtuos Ltd. Thomsen draws out the tension between the demand for such work and the possibility for exploitation it creates, as well as the role that changing profit margins in the video game industry play in exacerbating that tension.

Anshuman Iddamsetty interrogates why in video games being fat so often means being considered less than human.

In honor of the looping app’s one-year deathiversary, Ann-Derrick Gaillot traces how Vine disproportionately stunted the career paths of popular creators in Vine’s black community.

Why did the internet turn on this self-published poet? In the history of internet pile-ons, this one rates pretty high.

Aaron Edwards explores the function the group chat serves in the lives of black and brown Americans today.

In Ubud, Indonesia, Jessa Crispin looks at the impact of next-generation expats — Western tech workers and “digital nomads” in search of carefully curated, long-term authenticity.

One brother died accidentally, hit by a police cruiser that was trying to pull over a speeding car. Three years later, the other was shot and killed by an officer. In each case, the officers who killed them were absolved of any wrongdoing.

But then it didn’t happen. Or did it?