Journalism has always wrestled with the tension between finding fresh, new angles on stories and perpetuating falsehoods and fantasies, though never more so than amidst the click-driven insanity of its […]
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The way we use information is about to change. We have spent the last 40 years using computers to recreate our old 19th-century paper documents, and now we have a mess on our hands.
I’m challenging Apple to embrace the Semantic Web by hiring me to replace Steve Jobs as CEO. I’ve laid out my argument and launched my campaign here.
The Wikipedia page for John Updike claims to have last been modified today, on February 9, 2009. While Wikipedia allows unique disclaimers for subjects recently deceased—Updike died January 27th, of […]
Anyone in need of a moment’s release from our collective recession depression should check out of this piece in today’s Telegraph, which previews some revolutionary new consumer technologies on the […]
Perhaps the most sobering economic article in Sunday’s Times,among much sobering financial section news, was not an article at all. On page A21 a full-page warning, superimposed over the image […]
Bill Brown, a visiting professor of the practice of law at Duke University, says the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 is the best model for getting America out of […]
When the death toll reached 1,000 in the latest Israel-Palestine exchange, it made frontpage international headlines. Now that 900 people have been killed in the Congoas a result of a botched […]
For decades, the average Indian citizen could vote for the governmental representatives of his choosing and then follow their foibles in the news—and that’s where his access to government ended. […]
Blogs have erupted over the disappearance of documentary film maker/blogger/freelance journalist Philip Rizk. The grad student at AUC (American University in Cairo) was among a group of peaceful protesters detained […]
Bloomberg today reports that the yen rose against the dollar after “the U.S. government delayed the announcement of a financial- recovery plan.” Traders took refuge. “Japan’s currency gained as U.S. […]
Speaking today at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Vice President Joe Biden told the world that the U.S. would no longer be a swaggering soloist throwing its muscle around […]
A sophomore at the University of Virginia who has fought in Iraq, as well as a few of his classmates, have designed a stronger, more comfortable body armor that they […]
A team of hyper-geniuses at MIT’s Media Lab has designed a cellphone type device that gathers data on the environment around you, searches for information using the Internet, aggregates the […]
Lance Armstrong and doping. Marion Jones and steroids. Tanya Harding and a lead pipe. Scandal seems to inevitably follow on the heels of—or, in some cases, preclude—gold medals. So it […]
According to NASA, there is a green comet named Lulin approaching Earth. One astronomer calls it “a green beauty that could become visible to the naked eye any day now.” […]
Libertarian music critic Nat Hentoff, one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment, has joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow. In a press release issued by the […]
The British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks recently chronicled the experience of losing his sight from ocular melanoma in a series of journals and an interview with Wired magazine. It’s […]
I’ve more or less stopped paying attention to political news from Zimbabwe. As an increasing number of “talks” seem to end in reaffirmation of still President Mugabe’s Reign of Terror, […]
Demonstrated by his activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the official White House portal, President Obama is institutionalizing social networking as the interactive feature par excellence in American governance. The […]
The chief executive of Cisco, John Chambers, has emerged as one of Silicon Valley’s few optimists, proclaiming that the U.S. economy will recover this year. Oh my! An article in […]
In an editorial that strongly echoes the inaugural address and his reminder to Congress last week that “we don’t have a moment to spare,” Barack Obama told Washington Post readers […]
Investment banks, suddenly the target of pitchforks rather than perky Ivy Leaguers, are defunct. Hedge funds are all but wiped out—some of the remaining ones still in the game only […]
Here’s one demographic that’s been lurking under the surface of the new China: Nigerians living in Guangzhou. Apparently with nothing more than a few yuan in their pockets, Nigerians with […]
In these economic times, it’s hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t long for a dry martini. But Jason Wilson in the Washington Post today asserts that the “post-war era dry […]
Today kicks off the 2009 Green Jobs Conference in Washington, DC, hosted by the Blue Green Alliance, a coalition of labor groups such as SEIU and the United Steel Workers […]
In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon interviewed philosopher J. D. Trout about empathy.During the course of a rather hostile interview, Trout invoked the image of the Roman […]
Duke University’s Laura Brinn cautions that all the panicking that seems to be going on inside American corporations in response to the financial crisis—”canceling investments, scaling back projects, drawing on […]
The Cato Institute today explores the problem of “invisible” trade barriers. “Although they are part of a large and growing segment of world trade — and a prominent feature in […]
I can already hear Andy Rooney complaining. In the continuing saga of the death of the newspaper, a recent thought experiment takes another punch at the New York Times. According […]