barack obama

Former United States President Barack Obama in London, England on March 18, 2024.Photo: Carl Court (Getty Images)While Bill Pullman’s Independence Day character will likely always be the gold standard for how the President of the United States should react if hostile aliens invade, a certain real-life former POTUS seems a probable close second. It’s sci-fi guy Barack Obama, of course—a fan of author Liu Cixin, though he turned down a cameo in Netflix adaptation 3 Body Problem.Netflix Passwords, ChatGPT Can’t Detect AI,…

Takeshi Ebisawa, a purported leader in Japan’s Yakuza crime syndicate, was charged on Wednesday with trying to sell undercover DEA agents nuclear materials that he believed would eventually make their way to Iran. Why was it the DEA who nabbed Ebisawa? The Yakuza leader first tried to sell them drugs and surface-to-air missiles.What Drew Noomi Rapace to Constellation?The news comes from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who alleges Ebisawa started sending photos of “rocky substances” along…

Malia Obama's short film The Heart is a strange little creation. The Sundance Film Festival, now in its 40th edition, is rather an apt platform for first time filmmakers, providing space for many actors-turned-directors. Jesse Eisenberg and Lucy Lawless this year are a few names to begin that conversation. In that league, Obama is a non-starter. Obama is the 25-year-old daughter of the former U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. She previously worked with the writing team of Swarm, and also…

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo’s weekly deep dive on what’s been happening in artificial intelligence.Why is Everyone Suing AI Companies? | Future TechWhen I first saw a video of Dean Phillips, I thought it was a deepfake of Ron DeSantis. The guy’s head has roughly the same shape and hair color as the Florida governor’s, although his features are slightly less troll-like. Since then I’ve learned that no, actually, he’s a totally different guy. As a listless 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, Phillips still sorta…

Xunami Muse and Geneva Karr are making history on Season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The two queens — Muse, who’s Panamanian, and Karr, who’s Mexican — are the first two queens to compete on the show while living with DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “It’s a reality that is often overlooked,” Muse tells Rolling Stone. “Growing up there was this pressure of being a model citizen, and well guess what? We are these model citizens. All I want to do is spread my joy and do my drag and make people laugh…

When superstar musicians, Hollywood titans, and television power brokers make dumb decisions, the results are pretty negligible. We wind up with a free U2 album on our iPhone, an unfulfilling conclusion to the Godfather saga, or The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.  But when politicians make dumb decisions, the results are quite a bit more serious. If the political ruling class had just a little more sense, we might live in a world where Al Gore was president, Sarah Palin never became a national…

As he’s always wont to do, Barack Obama has been trickling out his favorite bits of culture from 2023 over the past few weeks, and he’s finally shared his list of favorite songs. The playlist is vintage Obama-core — a wide-ranging, always tasteful, potentially focus-grouped assortment of music from across the globe. A mix of hits, critical darlings, and plenty of songs that make you wonder, “Ok, which intern, or daughter, put him onto that?” (Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that — there’s plenty of…

Barack Obama has chosen sides. He's leaning more towards Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in the Barbenheimer debate. As is the custom every year, the former US president unveiled his list of favourite movies as 2023 comes to a close. The list included Hollywood tentpoles, world cinema, and films from his own production house. (Also Read: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer should have shown 'what happened to the Japanese people', says director Spike Lee) Barack Obama's favourite movies of 2023 include Oppenheimer…

Twitter is officially dead. Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of it late last year, people have been saying it’s dead or dying or will die. Musk ended the argument when he renamed the app “X.” And now, so many people seem to pine for the days when Twitter was good. But let me tell you, it was never good. It was a place of sadness and attention farming; a place for enemies and humiliation. It was, in short, shit.Google’s AI Isn’t a Gimmick, It’s the Future | AI UnlockedAfter renaming and subsuming Jack Dorsey’s…

Although Colman Domingo’s spent three decades in the entertainment industry, with title roles in the theater, he says he’s been sidelined in film and television. He played a trombonist in Chadwick Boseman’s final film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; counselor to Zendaya’s troubled Rue in Euphoria; a violent, turn-on-a-dime pimp in Zola, and the father to a wrongly accused Harlem artist (Stephen James) in If Beale Street Could Talk.  The craft and the composition comes first, he says, and by working in the margins of…