One year ago Rupert Murdoch took the stage at the Guggenheim Museum and with much fanfare introduced a News Corporation publication that, in the words of the Apple executive Eddy Cue, would “redefine the news.” A year later, it has not quite done that. It is not that The Daily, a $30 million…

Robert Ullman T o become a "member" at Mars Hill Church requires more than attending church. Becoming a full-fledged member—a process highly encouraged, and sometimes thunderously demanded, in Pastor Mark Driscoll's sermons—requires months of classes and a careful study of Doctrine: What Christians…

Most books about contemporary politics are designed for quick obsolescence. A notable exception to the rule is the work of Thomas Byrne Edsall, whose five careful books, starting with “The New Politics of Inequality” in 1984, are still found on the shelves and in the footnotes of everyone who writes…

Illustration by Aurich Lawson Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from…

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com A small celebrity-friendly restaurant in Utah is finally doing what many merchants have only dreamed of doing for a long time — taking on a part of the payment card industry’s powerful but flawed system for securing card data by fining merchants for failing to secure…

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.…

It’s that time of year when resolutions get made, and people have a bit of free time on their hands, and so thoughts turn to financial planning. This is a good thing. Top priority should always be liability management: make sure you’re not paying more interest than you need to, especially since…

In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy wars who has since written material for 16 Oscar telecasts and starred as the extra-large Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s…

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen have an unusually devoted platonic relationship. Credit Photograph by Gabriele Stabile Asmugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its…

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Fugazi, the single-mindedly independent post-punk band from Washington, was famous for how it operated in concert. From its first shows in 1987 until it went on indefinite hiatus 15 years later, the group kept ticket prices low — $5 or so — and, to the relief of some fans and the annoyance of…

I was in the third hour of a three-hour meeting on the afternoon of October 5, 2011, and I was feeling a bit punchy. The day before was an all-out sprint to cover Apple’s press conference and its fallout , along with plenty of technical snafus . So I was tired, the room was warm, and my mind was…

Image by Getty Images via @daylife “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes Recommended by Forbes In an interesting talk at the Gartner Symposium ITExpo 2011 on October 16-20,…

Reuters Competition in the illicit drug trade and reduced incentives for small-time dealers all coincided with this dramatic shift in U.S. cities Starting in the mid-1990s, major American cities began a radical transformation. Years of high violent crime rates, thefts, robberies, and inner-city…

Photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Image 1 of 3 DES MOINES, IA - OCTOBER 22: Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain speaks to a gathering of conservative Christians at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Presidential Forum on October 22, 2011 in Des Moines, Iowa.…

My iPhone slid out of my shirt pocket a few months ago and fell straight onto concrete. I was luckier than some: the only damage was a shattered back panel. I slapped a strip of black gaffers tape over it to keep it intact. I knew that I could take it to any Apple Store and have the back replaced…

App store constitutionalism Whether you think the iOS or Android app store model is better, one thing that's clear is that app stores aren't going away. And even on an open platform like Android, a large fraction of the user base will never venture outside the walled garden of the official app…

Dr. James Andrews, a widely known sports medicine orthopedist in Gulf Breeze, Fla., wanted to test his suspicion that M.R.I. ’s, the scans given to almost every injured athlete or casual exerciser, might be a bit misleading. So he scanned the shoulders of 31 perfectly healthy professional baseball…