Assessing Baseball's New Cellphone Plan
Welcome to One Man Focus Group, where obsessive critic Paul Lukas evaluates tomorrow's cultural detritus today. The call to the bullpen is one of baseball's time-honored rituals, right up there with...
View ArticleAtari Is Not an Anomaly
For those of us born in the 1970s, last week’s news of Atari’s demise came as a sentimental shockwave. Atari was our first video game console. It introduced us to Space Invaders and
View ArticleHow Do You Stop Racism on Twitter?
Last week, France embarked on a new frontier of hate speech prosecution: Twitter.
View ArticleThe Problem with Tweeting a Revolution
During the most heated days of the Tahrir Square protests, Andy Carvin sent more than 1,000 tweets per day. He kept at it for 18 hours at a time, aggregating and crowdsourcing information from...
View ArticleWhy Social Movements Should Ignore Social Media
There are two ways to be wrong about the Internet. One is to embrace cyber-utopianism and treat the Internet as inherently democratizing. Just leave it alone, the argument goes, and the Internet will...
View ArticleChina Is Not the Gaming Industry's Next Great Frontier
Last month, China Daily, the country’s main English-language paper, reported that the People’s Republic might lift its 13-year-old ban on video game consoles. Like many communiqués out of Beijing, this
View ArticleNewsomville
Let no one fault local governments for hiding from the networked era. Nearly every official and government agency in a major metro area uses Facebook and Twitter, and some cities have hosted app...
View ArticleMicrosoft's Mark Penn Mistake
When anyone bemoans the prevalence of negative advertising in political campaigns, there’s an easy reply: It works. That’s not always true in the corporate world. Just take Microsoft’s ongoing blitz of...
View ArticleApple Agonistes
In the history of commerce, only one corporation could fairly be compared to a major religion, in that it's amassed a devoted following and often is a source of public debate: Apple. But what happens...
View ArticleCat Photos on Ice
It’s easy to forget that what we see on the Internet doesn’t just show up on our screens magically. It’s a representation of immense quantities of data that have to be physically stored somewhere, most...
View ArticleThe Tech Community Needs to Grow Up
Ten days ago, a programmer named Adria Richards was attending PyCon, the foremost conference for the popular computer language Python, when she heard the two gentlemen sitting behind her engaged in...
View ArticleHow to Close the Tech Industry's Gender Gap
Every week, it seems, there’s another gender-related dustup in the technology world. The leader of a hacker movement quits over misogyny. A person in charge of recruiting Web developers is fired after
View ArticleMOOCs of Hazard
In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at...
View ArticleHow Much for That Startup?
In the aftermath of Amazon's purchase of the social book website Goodreads last week, the tech press went into a speculative tizzy: How much did the retail behemoth pay for the platform and its
View ArticleWant to Read the Law? It'll Cost You.
Say you live in Rhode Island and want to upgrade the ancient plumbing in your kitchen. You figure you should be able to save some cash and do it yourself, but want to make sure you're on the up-and-up...
View ArticleHow to Make Journalism Work on Facebook and Tumblr
A little over a year ago, the social blogging platform Tumblr dipped its toe into journalism with a new site called Storyboard. Staffed by three professional journalists, it aimed to highlight the neat...
View ArticleThe Case for Less
“The future is better than you think” is the message of Peter Diamandis’s and Steven Kotler’s book. Despite a flat economy and intractable environmental problems, Diamandis and his journalist co-author...
View ArticleThe Next Elizabeth Warren
Telecom regulators don’t usually have public followings, except perhaps among other telecom regulators. But as soon as rumors began circulating that Julius Genachowski planned to resign as chairman of...
View ArticleMargaret Atwood: The Literary World's Technology Mascot
It is very easy to sound like a cheeseball when talking about social media. This is especially true if you’re talking about how it’s changing the world, or how it’s making all of us more creative, or...
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