Essay The modern world has made us ill-equipped for the nuisances of past technologies, even as it has fuelled nostalgia for things that might transport us back to calmer times. April 17, 2026 Illustration by Bill Rebholz My dear friend sighs, slides her phone across the table between us so that…

THIS IS A STORY about two writers. A story, in other words, of envy. I met the man at an artists' colony, and I liked him from the first story I heard him tell. It was about how he'd once been jilted by a blind date, after which he went right out and bought himself some new clothes. He was working…

Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl? In February, at the Code/Media* conference in Dana Point, California, some of the most powerful people in media found themselves discussing an unsettling story published two weeks prior. The piece predicted that the future of the internet…

Is the media, as it gets ready to supply its product directly to social networks, becoming a “wire service?” Ezra Klein, on/on Vox : [M]y guess is that within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a…

I hate browsing the web on my phone. I do it all the time, of course — we all do. Just looking at the stats for The Verge, our mobile traffic is up 70 percent from last year, while desktop traffic is up only 11 percent. That trend isn’t going back; phones are just too convenient, beckoning us to…

Like the great magazines of yesteryear, Boing Boing lets really smart people tell us about the things they find interesting. When Boing Boing went from 'zine to blog, it was able to amass a huge audience with anything-but-mainstream material, as did many other sites that aggressively stuck to their…

At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most…

Bill Gates, long an avid reader , attended the TED conference again this year and continued his tradition of recommending books to fellow attendees. 1. Business Adventures, by John Brooks Warren Buffett recommended this book to me back in 1991, and it’s still the best business book I’ve ever read.…

Graham Roberts: How The New York Times Works http://t.co/9OEXNCZEHq

Aron Pilhofer: Our analytics platform, Ophan, is a gift, as I’ve said many times. A terrific interview with the folks behind it: https://t.co/YmToX0YMca