When speaking about how our society and culture are changing because of networked technologies, one of the many cheesy metaphors I often depend on goes something like this: In the 20th century we sat silently in the opera house; in the 21st century we find ourselves surrounded by the chaos and the pressure to participate [...]

Gabriela Tanasan teaching Getutza how to shoot video.
When I was in Romania last September I had the distinct privilege of meeting Getutza, one of the bloggers trained as part of the Blogging the Dream project in Campulung Moldovenesc, a small town in the north of the country. Eddie profiled Getutza on Rising Voices earlier this [...]

When Orhan Pamuk published The New Life in 1995 it became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. (1995 was the same year that Pamuk was tried along with several other authors for his support of Kurdish political rights in Turkey.) The book reads like a cross of Franz Kafka with Paulo Coelho. The Coelho half [...]

It took my favorite futurist, Scott Smith, to show me Santa Moncica’s best and most authentic cappuccino:

Wait, did I just call a cappuccino ‘authentic’? What does that even mean? Scott and I spent much of our morning kaffeeklatsch at Caffé Luxxe trying to deconstruct the concept. We last connected in Istanbul, but these days Scott [...]

I spent just about the entire weekend just about entirely offline – something I hope to keep up as February slides into March, days lengthen, and skinny jeans and boots give way to summer dresses and sandals.
So it came as quite a shock to turn the internet switch to on and discover that Chile [...]

This is probably the funniest six and a half minutes that I’ve spent on the internet in a long, long time. It also goes to show why guy friends (sorry ladies) are so much more fun than female friends: male bonding is more creative destruction than cautious compassion about feelings and emotions.
And that’s just so [...]

Last week I took a trip to Graz, a university town in southern Austria, to congratulate its fine residents for their most reasonable decision to remove my governor’s name from their local soccer stadium. Just playing. But seriously, listen to Act One of This American Life #398 and just try to tell me that you [...]

Open Society Institute, the network of philanthropic foundations established by billionaire George Soros, has long promoted access to information because it understands that information is power and that people in positions of power often try to withhold information from those who don’t have power. In most organizations – and even entire fields – information flows [...]

Liberia is getting some (does quote marks) love on Twitter today because of a new web documentary on Vice Magazine. What else can we find on Vice Magazine’s website?

I’m not happy about the documentary. Here’s the comment I left on Ethan’s blog post:
Idiotic, sensationalizing, simplistic, and in many places factually incorrect. And I say this [...]

What’s the point of getting drunk anyway? The point is this: you’re at the bar, you’re having fun, you walk upstairs, you take it all in. And you leave. There’s no need – no reason – to leave, but you leave. You’re on 3rd and Santa Monica and you start walking. You don’t know where [...]