Animated GIFs have become so huge. They're everywhere. But why? On the surface, they're pretty silly—a few frames of video, endlessly looping in time. There are GIFs of Star Trek's Picard facepalming, ...

The emergence of the animated GIF over the last few years has made short visual loops a regular part of our media diet, but the phenomenon is not an entirely new one. As Chris Baraniuk points out in ...

Ade Olonoh, the founder of the anonymous Q&A site Formspring, is setting his sights on animated GIFs. Loop is an iOS app for sending text updates to all of your friends at once — à la Twitter — but ...

Meet Orbo. He’s one of the most prolific and talented GIF artists on the Internet. His specialty is making GIFs that never end because they’re stuck in an infinite loop. I can stare at them all day.

The ancient GIF format isn’t going away anytime soon. With the birth of social media and memes, the three-decade-old format for lightweight, looping, sound-free animation has found a new lease on life ...

When is Natalie Portman's laughter not Natalie Portman's laughter? An Object Lesson. Aristotle called laughter an "ensouling mechanism," and the academic discipline of humor studies has built itself ...