Any of us could land on the unplugged side of the digital divide, all it would take is a natural disaster or civil conflict. But one group is building tools that make a cell phone connection all you'd need to share information during a crisis.
David Kobia is one of the founders of Ushahidi.
This six minute short film sets a typical frat house scene with heightened visual intensity: beer pong, drunk girls, guys with their shirts off doing shots, hazing rituals, fights. The twist is that the guy at the center of the film is clearly attracted to one of his frat brothers.
Ever heard of gold-farming? Cory Doctorow talks about some ways people get ahead in multi-player video games.
Pre-Modern hunter and gatherer cultures believed that dying was a kind of trial which didn't begin until you left your physical body and entered the supernatural world, according to sociologist Allan Kellehear. In these cultures, death is not the destruction of the body, but the annihilation of the personality and its transformation into something new.
Billy Collins has stepped down as America’s Poet Laureate, but he hasn’t stopped trying to make poetry more accessible and more widely read.
Poet Billy Collins bookmarks "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst."
Novelist Elinor Lipman has written an essay for the New York Times on the fine art of blurbing – writing short, pithy quotes to appear on fellow authors’ dust jackets.
Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Dangerous Idea: human vices are just as important as human virtues in shaping evolution.
