Opinion & Commentary

Remembering the influence of a teacher, critic, and thinker who brought the Web alive with ideas.

After fifteen years I've finally found the perfect writer's machine in the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. It fuses together both the best software and hardware of which a writer could ever dream, while boasting all of the slender and effortless portability of a composition journal. It is a writer's terminal in the purest sense: with its excellent battery life, ephemeral weight, satisfying keyboard and instant-on capabilities, the new MacBook Air is perfectly suited to be the nexus into the inner chaos of my own thoughts, feelings, hang-ups, pretensions and emotions as a blank page. So why isn't writing any easier?

Perspectives on the FCC's recent net neutrality ruling leave us thinking about the the rise of the app and the enclosure of the commons.

"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.