I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
The dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the Arpanet. Though fascinating, the Arpanet story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of Arpanet and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as
In a remote Nevada valley, the artist Michael Heizer’s astonishing megasculpture is finally revealed. The land art megasculpture known as “City” is a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert. It cost $40
Sixty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a B-52 bomber disintegrated over a small Southern town, crashing with two 3.8-megaton thermonuclear bombs on board. An eyewitness recalls what happened next: "I was just getting ready for bed," Reeves says, "and all of a
Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday, has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists, the Guardian reports. Al-Shehab, a mother of two young children,
A group of Afghan employees from the Kabul bureau of The New York Times adjust after evacuation to the United States: "Marwa Rahim began the day preoccupied with something very different than war. She had bought a new pink-and-white dress for the return of in-person medical school, and it
Two weeks ago, Sydney Sweeney was on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. The accompanying profile was full of glamorous photos, as is the custom. In the story that ran under and around those images, Sweeney talked about how frustrating it has been for her to watch nepotism babies breezily
The Liberty Inn, the last hourly rate hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, bills its rooms as the “most sexiest” in the city, and according to the New York Times, for nearly 50 years it has "provided sanctuary for bouts of afternoon passion, clandestine affairs and lunchtime quickies."
Plenty has been written about the death of reading among Generation Z, but those critics clearly aren’t taking into account the millions of words they consume every year while watching TV and films. A 2021 survey by the captioning charity Stagetext found that in the 18-25 age group, four
It’s part of what the IRS calls the “Pipeline”: a 1970s-era assembly line used to process tax returns at several locations around the country. And it might give you a sense of why Congress is on the verge of handing the agency $80 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act
Apparently Elon Musk, currently the world's richest man with a net worth of about $265 billion, doesn't live in a massive mansion somewhere. He said during a recent podcast with Canada's Nelk Boys that his main house is a small one he bought for
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