As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you're trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I'd like to work for you.

Hunter S. Thompson's brutally honest Canadian job request

WHAT IF GOOGLE WERE EVIL? Cory Doctorow imagines the worst

Haven't read this yet but it sounds like fun.

From The Magazine : Radar Online : Cory Doctorow imagines a world in which Google is evil

A telling moment comes at the end of the segment, when Kerouac turns to Sanders and declares, “Say, Ed, I was arrested two weeks ago. And the arresting policeman said, ‘I’m arresting you for decay.’” There’s a flash of cognitive dissonance: Did he really just say that? The crowd laughs, but it’s an edgy laughter, tempered by the shock of Kerouac’s self-awareness, by the sense that they’ve just caught a glimpse behind the curtain.

I'd nominate Kerouac as the patron saint of MemeStreams.

50 years after On the Road

] "From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent,"
] reads the first line of the H.P. Lovecraft story "The
] Shunned House," but chances are Lovecraft, who died in
] 1937, wouldn't have appreciated the irony of his present
] position as American literature's greatest bad writer.

A Salon article on H.P. Lovecraft. Just in time for Valentine's Day!

Salon.com Books | Master of disgust

] There's been a big discussion - especially since Iraq
] about whether America is an empire or not.
] Certainly we're involved in a lot of countries, and we
] have a kind of imperial reach, and people see us that
] way. But Americans are really not comfortable with this.
] They don't like the idea of ruling other people, and
] they're not in it for the long haul. They have no desire,
] like the British did in India, to rule in perpetuity. One
] of the big problems is that we are subject, as a
] democracy, to momentary enthusiasms for undertaking
] projects of various sorts. But a lot of times we don't
] have the staying power to see them through to the end.

Johns Hopkins Magazine - Fukuyama interview

Neal Stephenson has a new book, "Quicksilver", coming out next week.

Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail

] Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken
] glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet,
] the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its
] hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks
] of light came in through the closed shutters where they
] worked with the seriousness of creators - and
] destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of
] imagination had seen this house as it had now become.

Graham Greene; The Destructors

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. "

Swater mentioned this poem to me in a discussion about some recent drama related to a network we used to run. I'm sure it resonates with many of you who spent years building empires that have now turned to sand.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias

Lanier: A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story "Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two scientist/technologists on the team.

DJ Spooky: Sonar is one of the largest festivals of electronic music in Europe. Aside from the U.S.'s "Burning Man" Festival that occurs in August, it's one of the main places that international DJ culture can explore the outter limits of mix culture. But that's an understatement. To put it bluntly: it's THE festival that determines the taste and style of the currents of electronic that flow through the world's underground and avant-garde music in the early 21st century.

Review of _Linked_: We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we're all coming to realize that it's becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity?

Enter Albert-László Barabási and his new book, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Underneath our online world of seemingly random connections, the cells of our bodies and our social ties lies a network of hubs and ever-growing links with surprisingly not-random patterns.

On a related note, DJ Spooky has an excellent new CD (released in late May) called "Modern Mantra" that fans of drum and bass, hip-hop, ambient, dub, jazz, and other good music will enjoy. (Spooky has a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ on his bookshelf!)

Jaron Lanier, DJ Spooky and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in 21C Magazine

A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. A more detailed overview is available

Awesome. You must look at this.

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