via http://www.openculture.com/2009/05/getting_hired_and_fired_by_the_new_yorker_as_told_in_tweets.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/outloud http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/comment

• Rational Irrationality - The real reason that capitalism is so crash prone by John Cassidy - The New Yorker - October 6, 2009
• Steven Strogatz on sync - TED Talk - See also Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks.

...Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman’s Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested “The Bourne Identity” and a book by Michael Connelly, “The Lincoln Lawyer”—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

Outside, I sat on a bench near L. L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order “The Bourne Identity” wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of “The Bourne Identity.” What?

Reflections: NO NAME, NO NUMBER: The New Yorker "Tells about the torture he experienced and how he survived by behaving passively; tells about his thoughts, including consideration of suicide. He was held in three cladestine sites and two legal prisons. The Jewish question dominated every interrogation during his imprisonment. There was a desire on the part of his captors to eradicate Jews wholesale. Tells about groups other than Jews who were persecuted. Most of those killed were no Jews. There are 400,000 Jews in Argentina and writer deplores their inaction in the face of rising Nazism. Gives complex circumstances of his release: he lost his citizenship and property and was sent to Israel in 1979 after thirty months of imprisonment."

www.robotwisdom.com "For readers, the Internet is an embarrassment of riches, with thousands of pages of new text t sift through daily. Thank goodness, then, for "weblogs," sites that scour the Web for interesting prose and data. What elevates Robot Wisdom above other weblogs is the catholicity of its creator, Jorn Barger, who has a healthy appetite for everything from literature to science. The result is a world defined by Barger's curiosity, in which an article about a grand plan to film all nineteen Beckett plays sits comfortably alongside a report on post-Chernbyl cleanup efforts."

"Keywords Adamstown, Pennsylvania; All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Architects, Architecture; Architectural salvage; Barger, Jorn; Civil Liberties, Civil Rights; Communications ABSTRACT: WEB SIGHTINGS reviews of NYC Surveillance Camera Project (www.mediaeater.com/cameras); Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus (www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus); Inside.com ( www.inside.com); The On-Line Books Page (digital.library.upenn.edu/books); Ed Donaldson Hardware Restorations (www.eddonaldson.com); All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com); Robot Wisdom (www.robotwisdom.com)."

Keywords Blogs; Internet; Communications; Hourihan, Meg; Kottke, Jason; Pyra; E-mail ABSTRACT: DIGITAL CULTURE about Meg Hourihan, and blogging (making a diary-like hyperlinked log) one's discoveries on the net. . . Meg is one of the founders of a company called Pyra, which produces an Internet application known as Blogger. Blogger, which can be used free on the Internet, is a tool for creating a new kind of Web site that is known as a "weblog," or "blog," of which Megnut is an example. A blog consists primarily of links to other Web sites and commentary about those links. . . Jason Kottke, a Web designer from Minneapolis who maintains a site called Kottke.org, is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture. (On the strength of the picture transmitted by his Webcam, he is also widely perceived as very cute. If you read around..."

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt"

"Dr. Fadl had laid the intellectual foundation for Al Qaeda’s murderous acts. His defection posed a terrible threat."