Post Crunch business plans

With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”

The NYT on the rise and rise of Unigo.

You Tube and adverts

Right now, Publicis and Google have been testing ads on the iPhone’s YouTube app and are currently working on apps for the Google Android smartphone, but were otherwise tight-lipped about what might be coming.

Paid Content on how an advertiser and Google can get along.

Land is so old school

Still have a landline? You’re showing your age. The young, hip, cool people have cellphones only, and that is bad news for traditional phone providers. In a survey of Internet users, JupiterResearch found that 12 percent “do not subscribe to fixed voice service, and nearly two-thirds of them are ages 18 to 34.”

From the NYT.

Blog comment as theatre

It’s all very Twitter meets Improv Everywhere. Very interesting idea –who would have guessed blog comments could become a stage ...

Thanks to PSFK.


Here's a quote:

Oh it is a long list Mr. Morrison. The Saudi’s, the Roman Catholic church, Hamas, Al Qaeda, a dozen private parties, hell the CIA. Lots of people have motive, but George had the best motive. If he is dead, it’s because George wanted to die.

And here's the live theatre.

IM Productivity

Analysis of these data indicates that IM use has no influence on overall levels of work communication. However, people who utilize IM at work report being interrupted less frequently than non-users, and they engage in more frequent computer-mediated communication than non-users, including both work-related and personal communication.

From:

R. Kelly Garrett
School of Communication
Ohio State University

James N. Danziger
School of Social Sciences
University of California, Irvine

"...blog, widgetise and get connected..."

Traditional media people and investors, for example, are happy to spend cash on TV ads, or interruptive online ads, or print ads. Because they get them. They understand that they are to be broadcast and consumed by audiences. And they are part of the audiences that do the consuming.

One of those ROI of social media things. Nostalgia for the experiential world?

But there are also unknown unknowns...

"Specific information demonstrating that the alleged dragnet has not occurred cannot be disclosed on the public record without causing exceptional harm to national security," Mukasey wrote in a federal court filing in San Francisco. "However, because there was no such alleged content-dragnet, no provider participated in that alleged activity."

From Wired.


There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.

Online Etiquette at 35,000 feet

This is all about etiquette.


But first a question.

What's worse: sitting next to a guy watching porn, or sitting next to a guy yabbering away on Skype?

In space nobody can hear you scream. But in mid-air it is very different. Especially on American. From The Consumerist.

Palinography

The revelation that Sarah Palin maintained two separate Yahoo Mail accounts - both of which have now been deleted - is raising new questions over how much official government business she was conducting with non-logged, private mail services. Palin has come under fire for withholding more than a thousand e-mails from recent public records requests. The New York Times reports that Palin's staff had actually looked into whether using the Yahoo Mail accounts "could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records."

New Twists and Turns in Palin E-Mail Hack, from PC World's blog.

Thought police

A three day conference on largely Jacobean spies has slowed the posting. But here's one for the New Jacobeans on the block.

The U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing "thought helmets" that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will "lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone."

From Time.

Not worth the paper it wasn't written on

More trust - unsurprisingly. This from former US labour secretary, Robert Reich. Here's his Wikipedia entry.

The Street's fundamental problem isn't lack of capital. It's lack of trust. And without trust, Wall Street might as well fold up its fancy tents. Financial markets trade in promises—that assets have a certain value, that numbers on a balance sheet are accurate, that a loan carries a limited risk. If investors stop trusting the promises, financial markets can't function.Yet it's turned out that many of these promises weren't worth the paper they were written on. The subprime mess triggered the collapse of trust, but financial markets were in danger of such a fall even before mortgage-backed loans were shown to be worth far less than anyone supposed. That's because when the market was roaring a few years back, many financial players had no idea what they were buying or selling. Even worse, they didn't care, as long as they were making money.

What is perhaps more surprising is this article's title. From USNews.com.

The You Tube Librarians

From that nice Mr/Ms Google.

We just launched Google Audio Indexing (aka GAudi) in Google Labs. The dedicated site offers more features, such as "search within video" and "sharing," and a more robust user interface.

Everything you wanted to see from the US elections. Kind of. Google Audio Indexing.

Civic Games

Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.

Pew on American teenage gaming.


Download the PDF report here.

Trust is everywhere

Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman's collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the reverberations will continue.

The crisis in trust extends beyond banks. In the global context, there is dwindling confidence in US policymakers. At July's G8 meeting in Hokkaido the US delivered assurances that things were turning around at last. The weeks since have done nothing but confirm any global mistrust of government experts.

Joseph E Stiglitz is university professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics. More here.


And Stiglitz own site.

Do the mass math

Yet when the sheer number of Media vehicles radically increases, the median number of consumers attracted to any vehicle decreases because the total number of consumers are spread across many more vehicles (the so-called 'fragmentation' of audiences). That tends to reduce the median revenues of those vehicles. Mass Media vehicles try to compensate for this by 'dumbing' the quality of their content, attempting to attract a larger audience by appealing to a lower common denominator and restore larger numbers of consumers.

More wisdom from Vin.

Europe to get innovation and technology?

The EIT will combine "the three parts of the knowledge triangle - education, research and business innovation", in a venture not tried in Europe before, Mr MacDonald said. Such networks had been "lamentably unexplored" in the EU previously, he added.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has held its inaugural meeting in the Hungarian capital Budapest.

Paris and Memory

Laurie from the Paris blog on place and memory in Les Halles during...

...the early 1980s, when Les Halles became a hotspot for youth culture. The hideous mall converted from the farmers market Eric describes below was brand new at the time, and it (along with the drug trade at the Fontaine des Innocents) drew young hipsters.

A response to:





This all feels very Tom Coryat meets Walter Benjamin.

Facebook and Trust

At the Information Security Conference in Taiwan this week, researchers from the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) in Greece will present details of an experiment that involved enlisting Facebook users in a potentially devastating kind of Internet attack. The researchers created an application that displays photographs from National Geographic on a user's profile page. However, invisible to the user, the app also requests large image files from a target server--in this case, a test machine hosted at FORTH. Provided that enough people add the application to their page, the resulting flood of requests can shut down the server or render it inaccessible to legitimate users.

From MIT's Technology Review on social networking and "malicious code".

Groundhog paper

Picture from the NYT.


But there was a happy ending in Groundhog Day, despite everything.

Plastic Logic will introduce publicly on Monday its version of an electronic newspaper reader: a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look — but not the feel — of a printed newspaper.

The device, which is unnamed, uses the same technology as the Sony eReader and Amazon.com’s Kindle, a highly legible black-and-white display developed by the E Ink Corporation. While both of those devices are intended primarily as book readers, Plastic Logic’s device, which will be shown at an emerging technology trade show in San Diego, has a screen more than twice as large. The size of a piece of copier paper, it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

From the NYT.

This Wednesday, Cambridge University startup Plastic Logic, which is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, will open a factory in Dresden, Germany, that will produce about 11 million large, flexible electronic-paper display units a year. The displays will be used in an electronic reader that the company showed at the Demo conference in San Diego last week. The product, which is scheduled to be commercially launched in January, uses display technology from E Ink and backplane technologies that employ polymer electronics developed by Plastic Logic's founders at Cambridge University.

From MIT's Technology Review.

Material Grr

For me, the Madonna experience was an example of a market failure. The seller of the product may know something about its quality. The buyer of the product, though, has to take its quality on trust simply because it's not possible to inspect the potential purchase before parting with one's cash. Of course, it's always worth reading the views of critics (they exist in part because markets do indeed fail) but, as there was only the one concert at Wembley, you'd have to draw conclusions from her performance at other venues. On the night, some people walked out but, as the show was costing punters around £1.50 a minute, the majority presumably thought they should hang around.

This issue of trust is a problem across a wide range of markets. Information failures can destroy markets remarkably quickly. Financial markets, in particular, rely on trust. Indeed, those familiar with the banking system know that it depends entirely on trust: no bank could repay all its depositors in one day because the money simply doesn't exist (which is one reason why, when the run started, Northern Rock was such a disaster). For the most part, trust is maintained but, once in a while, things go horribly wrong, perhaps because those who were trusted abused their positions. And, as trust disappears, once-respected brands become vulnerable. Madonna, be warned.

The managing director of economics at HSBC on trust and hard candy.

Gotta love that CERN bean thing

Space and cool and the NYT.

L'esprit de l'escalier sorta

Foucault’s research for Madness was largely completed while he was in intellectual exile in Sweden, at Uppsala. Perhaps that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much of his information.

The history of madness gets a kicking...

...a while ago.


Thanks to the Mind Hacks people.

And the bestseller is

James Patterson doesn't think of himself as a writer. Indeed, in person he's not remotely awesome, nor flashy. Sporting standard-issue polo shirt, chinos and deck shoes, he's softly spoken and surprisingly modest. "I recently had [my 61st] birthday party," he says, "and asked 16 friends; some went back all the way to kindergarten, and the consensus, which I really like, was that I'm still the same asshole that I always was. There didn't seem to be a lot of airs. I don't think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as [my wife] Sue's pal and [my son] Jack's friend, and I like to scribble. That seems to be the truth about who I am."

But then there is this...

He currently outsells JK Rowling, John Grisham and Dan Brown put together. This year he's on target to sell more than 20m books in the US alone, adding to his $1.5bn in global sales, making him the world's bestselling author by a mile. Oh, and he's also the most borrowed author from UK libraries.

From the Independent on Sunday.

David Foster Wallace - 1962 - 2008

Born Ithaca, New York, February 21, 1962
Died Claremont, September 12, 2008

Google and Trust

Still, the bigger Google gets, the more trust will become an issue. I think they need to look at alternatives. Why not, for example, establish an appeals panel made up of advertisers and users to adjudicate issues such as SourceTool's? This would require Google to hand down its laws — or more to the point to draft its constitution: the definitions for good sites rather than spam, not in algorithm-busting detail but as high-level goals.

But another Google era wrinkle appears: scale. When the web is developing by the minute, it’s impossible — and potentially limiting and dangerous — to write even the broadest definition of what’s good. And your good is not necessarily mine.

It’s all about trust. The question will be whether I trust Google or the government or the market more.

Jeff Jarvis on...


...Google and Trust.

Sunday Morning

Working on a chain gang?

Take the example of the bailout/takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States.

In America Fox News, so denounced as statists by so many libertarians, had many critical voices on Monday September 8th. On Neil Cavuto's "Your World" show both M. Malkin and Bob Barr (who are very different from each other on so many political issues) both laid in to the corrupt statism. And Mr Cavuto also did so. The next day (Tuesday 9th September) Ron Paul was on the show - continuing the attack. Later on the 8th of September the Brit Hume show (although Mr Hume himself was away) Ed Crane of the Cato Institute was on denouncing the bailout/takeover. There were, of course, other voices and perhaps to let Fannie and Freddie go bankrupt would have been even worse than what the government did - but this is not my point.

My point is that there was no dissent in Britain - from any media source. The BBC did not even report in its main news shows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the government and run by political cronies. The leftist Independent newspaper gloatingly declared that President Bush had "torn up years of lassez faire polices". The claim that there has ever even been a "lassez faire" policy in the United States under President wild spending Bush is such a blatant bit of agitprop that it is hard to know how to respond to it.

And the so-called 'Conservative' newspapers? No dissent anywhere - at least none I could find. In fact the Daily Mail was demanding something similar for Britain.

George Lakfoff calls this stuff "framing". Samizdata's Paul Marks wants to know if he is living in a communist country.


Somewhere in Highgate cemetry I imagine a coffin is spinning uncontrollably.

The Fact of the Matter, doesn't matter

Now, though, facts seem irrelevant, at least to the campaigns. “I think we may have had an impact earlier in the campaign,” says Viveca Novak of FactCheck.org, “but now we don’t seem to be having much of one.”

Slate on the End of Facts.

When a politician says something, the assumption is that it adheres, however loosely or distantly or illogically, to the truth. This week has shown that assumption to be hopelessly naive.

Fears mount that writers may be drinking less

There seems to be this funny idea going around that a successful writer is “professional”– in demeanor, in dress, in temperance. I’m horrified by that idea, if only because one of the central reasons I first entered this profession was that none of these things would be required of me.

Writers: let the contemporary nomad know about the number of alcohol units you consume per day.

...writing's on the wall

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

These are the stories we tell around the campfires, that sort of thing? Maybe there's not so much of it these days.

"Once you get to things like avoiding ladders and cats crossing the road, it's clear that culture and modern life have had an influence on many of these things," says Foster.

"My guess would be that in modern life, the general tendency to believe in things where we don't have scientific evidence is less beneficial than it used to be," he adds.

Hmm.

I wonder whether AOL.com is like “The CBS Evening News” — an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling.

Asks the NYT.

In search of search

In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It’s clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it’s also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search.

Now this is really interesting. From Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience...


...at Google.

Privacy, what privacy?

Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person's movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of her steps taken, her calories burned, and even the quality of her sleep. Data is wirelessly uploaded to the Web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends.

Fitbit here


Story from Technology Review.

Trust Again

Two prestigious institutions, the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute, want to do something about that and have teamed up to create the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.


Earlier this week, the commission held a forum at the Google campus in Mountain View. I was invited because over the past year I've been conducting the Next Newsroom Project, where with money from the Knight Foundation I've been trying to design "the newsroom of the future." (Any suggestions?)


The discussion during the daylong session ranged all over the map. But one key theme came up repeatedly that I think should top the commission's agenda:


In a world where everyone is becoming a publisher, how can a community find information that it can trust?

Read on at Mercury News.

Freedom at a cost?

At yesterday's RIN Freedom of Information workshop an interesting position from Dr. Harriet Jones.

As FOI is implemented over time, it becomes harder and harder for hard-pressed officials to fulfil FOI requests within the legislated time limit. Those obligations take priority over the systematic review of records being transferred to national archives, an extremely important task which gets hopelessly de-prioritised. Inevitably, standards suffer, and neither process is satisfactory, so that researchers end up waiting so long for requests to be filled that they stop using FOI; and the quality of the records that end up getting transferred to archives deteriorates.

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information said that around 100,000 FOI requests are made a year.


But surprisingly few academics are doing so, said Professor Duncan Tanner of Bangor University. Does that mean most historians are either working on 30 year old history - or working on partial information sets about more contemporary issues?


The Campaign for Freedom of Information blog is here.

Your new girlfriend (seventh iteration)

So in yet another example of mobile success, the service really took off, when Artificial Life released a simplified version, where V-Girl would require less keystrokes and interaction, and more of her "personality" and the gaming experience was on the servers over at Artificial Life, and the individual gamer would more react to V-Girl, that initiate interactions.

From Communities Dominate Brands.

Web optimists and pessimists

At the Technology Liberation Front Adam Thierer suggests a way of categorizing some of the books that shape the current internet debate: those that see it as a force of good, and those that don't.

Many Net optimists have a tendency to paint an excessively rosy picture of the transformative nature of the Net. In the extreme, the optimists seem to imply that the Net is somehow remaking man, altering human nature, and changing the economy only for the better. Among the Net optimists, there’s often a lot of romanticized talk of collective action / intelligence overcoming all barriers to knowledge or progress, and so on.

Check out the full details here.


It's a great primer to the debate.

Euston, September the eighth, after a seminar on Freedom of Information

FOI tommorow.





After Euston, Camden.

Tudorial

Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention - a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) - introduced to the show with cries of "by God, what is that?", and other such, from the actors.

Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV - some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.

Getting angry with the BBC take on Tudor history.

The Facebook News Feed is Two

We are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike.

---

What the hell happened to my views on privacy and the views of so many others?

Asks Mashable's Ben Parr.


---

When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.

---


The NYT in more Facebook News Feed depth.

How to Review a Forger?

But these aren’t petty or victimless crimes– they are not only crimes against literature and culture, they are also crimes against the very people, businesses, and institutions dedicated to discovering, documenting, promoting, protecting, and preserving for all time the valuable and often irreplaceable artifacts of our civilization.

A research expert on a literary forger.

Newspapers and Trust part 42

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that's the 51% advantage.

Huff-po on why a good candidate isn't winning by a mile.

Open search

By opening its index to thousands of independent programmers and entrepreneurs, Yahoo hopes that BOSS will kick-start projects that it lacks the time, money, and resources to invent itself. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research and a consulting professor at Stanford University, says this might include better ways of searching videos or images, tools that use social networks to rank search results, or a semantic search engine that tries to understand the contents of Web pages, rather than just a collection of keywords and links.

It isn't all Google.


Although most of it...

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in.

...still is.

From Nick Carr's Rough type.

DNA evolution

...genome sequencing is no longer just a research tool. Anyone with $350,000 to spare and an adventurous spirit can now have his or her own genome sequenced.

The Genetic Early Adopters.

More

Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

It has to be Google, again.

Word up

But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

Name that newspaper.

Two takes on convention politics

From Wired.

Politics is the opiate of of journalism and it’s time to go to rehab.

From Buzz Machine.

Deckard's choice of mobile?

According to the Android guys, this is the Google phone.

And it launches this week.

A matter of taste

Although a violent death in Brooklyn, where I live, might have made the front page 50 years ago, The New York Times, the New York Post and The Daily News kept mum on their Web sites. Eventually, The New York Sun carried a notice online: “Man Found Dead in Bathtub.” Although the “police said they recovered knives at the scene,” according to the article, “there is no criminality suspected.”

On reporting death.


Narrowcast news by Virginia Heffernan.

Another magnum, luvvie?

Personally, I find the images thought-provoking and beautiful. They free the fashion world from its ivory tower isolation and allow it to circle ethical issues — without forcing any particular conclusions on the viewer.

Photography, war, and fashion. An interesting post from the NYT.

Phone Politics

We may get excited about political campaigns going mobile in the beginning but as the interaction and messages remain stale so will our excitement eventualy become.

"When that happens," Wark points out, "people tend to refuse communications that do not come from a reliable source. So if you want to get out an email or a text send it to a friend, ask her to pass it on to a friend and so on." To its credit the Obama text campaign does ask you to "Forward to a friend" but if I understand what Wark is saying correctly there is a difference between being asked to do that by an automated Barak text message robot instead of your brother, or best buddy or cute boy or girl.

From TechPresident.

Putting you on Holde

Late to this, but still fun.

Strategy 101

John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.

From Pressthink at NYU.

Sometimes we need the Economist

That point is the extraordinary myopia of a line much-written by the European press in recent days: that the European Union has ended up in charge of the Georgia crisis, because the United States is so "distracted" by the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the weakness of a lame-duck administration.

From the often useful Certain Ideas of Europe blog tucked inside The Economist site somewhere.

A weakened, distracted America has just promised a billion dollars (€700m) in aid for Georgia with about half of that earmarked for "fast-track" delivery, sent two warships to Georgia bearing humanitarian relief supplies, and is about to send the USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the 6th Fleet, into the Black Sea. It has also sent the vice president, as mentioned above.

Even more here.

Who needs The Economist?

“Sarah’s smile is sincere, which I never felt from Hillary, who has anger and resentment in her eyes,” said Ann Schmuecker, a delegate from Mountain Home, Arkansas, where she met the Clintons decades ago.

Friends of Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, say she is the Obama campaign’s greatest weapon in pointing out Democrats’ differences with Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain.

From the NYT.

Surely the literary quote of the year?

Much of the zest in English fiction comes from rogue individualists looking for new ways to lose money by leaving orphaned books for future scavengers to discover and promote.

Iain Sinclair in the Guardian while writing about a man called Roland Camberton, "the great invisible of English fiction" - it seems.

Tom and Now

Thanks Google.


Makes it all much easier. Betwixt continues, and will be back regularly soon.

The Future of Polling

Since betting real money keeps people honest (to reduce their loses), markets with real money are considered a much better indicator of opinion than a mere poll — which has no “penalty” for being less than honest. But real money prediction markets are (stupidly) illegal in the US. So token markets like Long Bets and Bet2Give are devised to innovate around the law.

Kevin Kelly.

Get Happy!

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, where people were asked about their sense of wellbeing, the researchers were able to draw up a map of happiness down to district level across England, Scotland and Wales.

After adding in factors such as employment, health and educational qualifications, the team found that the area of Brecknock, Montgomery and Radnor in Powys was the happiest place.

It's Wales.

Unmapped: good for driving

"Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history - not to mention Britain's remarkable geography - at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.

"We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there."

The president of the British cartography society on new maps.

Even if this is fiction it is worrying...

...and the author is a novelist.


Live from the Obama afterparty (ft. Oprah).

"Nice to meet you, Congresswoman," our driver said a few minutes later as we exited and Friend Two led us purposefully toward a black town car that miraculously sat idling next to the bus we were planning to jump on.

I smiled magnanimously. What can I say? A dozen years of Catholic school might be a black mark on my record, but it made me a good liar and an even better politician.

From radar online.