I’m still not sure what precipitated it, but the other night at San Francisco’s Jackson Fillmore restaurant, over a couple large bowls of linguini with butter and cheese, my four year-old son raised his fork and tried to stab my two year-old daughter in the head. His mother quickly restrained him while I checked the [...]

A few months ago my friend Hudson was working on a new and promising internet business. He hired contractors for most of the work – design, graphics, engineering. Once the site was done and ready for launch, his engineer called him and demanded more money. After Hudson rightfully said no, the engineer responded by hijacking [...]

Looking back on it now, the first time I truly felt the need for a note-taking app was when I started researching note-taking apps. I was just looking for a simple tool to save ideas about upcoming articles or jot down an occasional to-do list. Stop. Do not send me your pick for best note-taking [...]

It seems like a great time to be a bully. When I was a kid, even the most productive bullies could only manage a handful of victims at a time. What used to take a lot of effort can now be handled with a couple thumbs and some wifi. A hateful rumor can spread a [...]

You might be one of those people who just can’t get enough of this Charlie Sheen story, following him from television to TMZ to Twitter. And who could blame you? The story has all the elements that we love: Celebrities, bad TV, drugs, sex, and self-destruction (generously re-branded as winning). On the other hand, you [...]

Journalist Nir Rosen managed to do the near-impossible. He published some tweets offensive enough to rise above the din of the Internet’s general state of offensiveness and lost his fellowship at NYU. Rosen’s offending tweets were in response to the reports that CBS’ Lara Logan had been sexually assualted near Tahrir Square on the day [...]

How could god let this happen? I am the Jewish child of Holocaust survivors, so that is a question that I have heard asked throughout my life. Everyone from the most revered religious leaders to George Burns playing the title character in Oh God, Book 2, has tackled that enquiry. During the early nineties, I [...]

The other night I was sitting in San Francisco’s Herbst Theater listening to renown physicist Brian Greene lecture about string theory, the possibility of multiple universes, and the exciting search for one unified, invisible force that connects us all — from the farthest galaxy to the smallest speck of matter. Greene was riveting and the [...]

ABC. Always Be Closing. That’s the advice that Alec Baldwin’s character gives to a roomful of ragged salesmen in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Always Be Closing. The same message could easily apply to almost everyone who shares on the web. We’re all trying to close. We want to close our potential employers, our readers, [...]

The latest Pew Internet study indicates that Internet users are more likely to be socially engaged and active partipants in groups than non-Internet users. The folks over at ReadWriteWeb provided a reaction to the survey that’s representative of much of what I’ve seen on the web. That old stereotype that Internet users are isolated and [...]