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CBGB, New York by James Warner Jennifer Egan’s fiction asks whether our experience is now technologically mediated to the point that we routinely mistake the map for the territory. In her book A Visit from the Goon Squad , she evokes a world where the pressure constantly to self-reinvent threatens…

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Credit: Illustration by Richard Mia Was President Barack Obama born in Hawaii? I find the question so absurd, not to mention possibly racist in its motivation, that when I am confronted with “birthers” who believe otherwise, I find it difficult to even focus on their arguments about the difference…

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The latest refrain in popular science is that ‘your brain is plastic’, that experience has the potential to ‘rewire’ your brain, and that many previous mysteries in cognitive science can be explained by ‘neuroplasticity’. What they don’t tell you is that these phrases are virtually meaningless.…

‘Is pornography driving men crazy?’ asks campaigner Naomi Wolf in a CNN article that contains a spectacular misunderstanding of neuroscience applied to a shaky moral conclusion. Wolf asks suggests that the widespread availability and consumption of pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and…

107 36 Many years ago, I ran across a good icon design tutorial. It said that having unique contours to icons help users scan for the item they're looking for. If this is true, why don't iPhone and Android app icons use unique contours? iPhone iPhone icons are all rounded squares. The only visual…

Most things don’t work out.

I returned this week from the Eyeo festival , a gathering of many of the world's most influential and innovative data visualization artists. The presentations spanned the thoughtful storytelling of Amanda Cox ( Turning a Corner ), the playful, organic aesthetic of Moritz Stephaner ( Notabilia ), the…

Sitting on the very bumpy flight back from New York to San Francisco, I finally had a chance to catch up on all the hullaballoo around the newly launched Color app. With the stunning amount of cash the company raised from white-shoe venture firm Sequoia Capital and the big-name founding team , not…

The Knight Foundation, a non-profit entity that is one of the biggest funders of media-related projects in the United States — including the new MIT Center for Civic Media, which we wrote about earlier — announced the winners of its annual $4.7-million News Challenge on Wednesday. There’s s a theme…

Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she…