Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-sea...

Yoda is a fictional character in the Star Wars universe, first appearing in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. He is a small, green humanoid alien who is powerful with the Force and served as Grandmaster of the Jedi Order. In The Empire...

The Argentine Invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2nd April 1982 necessitated Britain's first major naval operation since Suez. Eventually over a hundred ships were employed, of which only 44 were warships, 25 Royal Fleet Auxiliaries and 45...

Kim Jong-un is the Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and supreme leader of North Korea. Kim is the second child of Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) and Ko Yong-hui. Before taking power, Kim was rarely seen in public, and many of the acti...

Ruslan Olegovich Ponomariov is a Ukrainian chess player and FIDE World Chess Champion between 2002 and 2004. He was runner-up in the Chess World Cup 2005 and Chess World Cup 2009, while reaching the semi-finals in 2011 and the quarterfin...

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president. It was co-founded as a private company...

Former animator Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Batman, Mars Attacks!) made his feature directorial debut with this delightful comedy, coscripted by the late Phil Hartman (who also appears briefly as a reporter). Wise...

The disaster that occured at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine) plant on April 25th 1986 is an example of the devastation that can occur when a nuclear reaction goes wrong. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant...

Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist who committed suicide in the context of a prosecution that was widely believed to be overly zealous and inappropriate. Swartz was i...

When it arrived on the big screen in 1987, Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop was like a high-voltage jolt of electricity, blending satire, thrills, and abundant violence with such energized gusto that audiences couldn't help feeling stunned and amaz...

The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. In 1989 a series of revolutions in nearby Eastern Bloc countries—Poland and Hungary in particular—caused a chain reaction...

The Tiananmen Square protests were a set of national protests in the People's Republic of China, which occurred between April 15, 1989 and June 4, 1989, centered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. The protests were part of a conflict be...

Edward Scissorhands achieves the nearly impossible feat of capturing the delicate flavor of a fable or fairy tale in a live-action movie. The story follows a young man named Edward (Johnny Depp), who was created by an inventor (Vincent Pric...

Sven Magnus Carlsen is a Norwegian chess grandmaster, and the current World Chess Champion. Carlsen was a chess prodigy. He became a chess grandmaster in 2004 at the age of 13 years, 148 days, which made him the third-youngest grandmaste...

If a copy of The Name of the Rose on the coffee table was a badge of intellectual superiority in 1983, Eco's second novel--also an intellectual blockbuster--should prove more accessible. This complex psychological thriller chronicles the de...