Opinion & Commentary

"If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. " Bruce Sterling's take on Wikileaks, an affair worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

In a post at the Atlantic today, Jaron Lanier offers to reframe the Wikileaks question. But what he does looks much more like the infamous mission statement of the National Review: to stand athwart history yelling �stop!�

In Boston, clouds and swirling snow deprived us of the sight of a blood-red lunar eclipse on the eve of solstice. The two phenomena have nothing to do with one another astronomically; but as a member of a species drawn to pattern like moths to lamplight, I felt the urge to seek an open patch in the clouds, even at three o'clock in the morning�to no avail.

Are you doing the Boston Typewriter? Perhaps we're lucky that when it comes to marketing, viral video has its limits.

In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought copyright monopolies, walled-garden mobile phone formats, and privacy invasion in the social media, helping keep the Internet safe�even for 8-bit nostalgia. Video after the jump.

Minecraft isn't just PC gamings' trendiest new box of 8-bit building blocks. It's also a solipsist's god sim... with all of the loneliness and pathos that implies.

With Julian Assange now free on bail in England, we should ask what the plight of his forsaken source has to say about the Wikileaks moment.

Old-fashioned telephone handsets and film cameras: gadgets that redeem the present by way of obsolete technology.

A teenager who fell to his death from the wheel well of a Boston-bound airliner furnishes an example of a rarity in our time: a truly outrageous act.

On October 7th, 1930 � slender and bright; like a string tense and silent in anticipation of the purpose of her note � Beatrice Warde was introduced to the British Typographer's Guild. The speech she gave would change the way people thought about type for the next fifty years... and should be burnt into the flesh of anyone who is making a gadget to this day.