Now that we have been conditioned, by experience or Kerouac, to idealize the open road, it may seem quaint that the dream, in those early days, was to replicate the surrender and effortlessness of train travel, where you didn’t have to navigate at all. But, in some respects, the rail ideal persists; we’ve just got craftier about aspiring to it. Navigation is big business these days. Web sites that offer maps and directions, such as MapQuest and Google Earth, are growing more sophisticated; global-positioning satellite technology and the in-car navigation systems that rely on it, such as General Motors’s OnStar and Hertz’s NeverLost, are becoming ubiquitous. Geographic Information Systems, or G.I.S., may be the plastics of our time. It’s not hard to envision the demise of the paper road map, in a generation or two, because a map, for all its charms, is really a smorgasbord of chance information, most of it useless. Who cares where Buffalo is, if you’re trying to get to Coxsackie? Most people just want to be told where to turn.

Ouch. How's that for an indictment of modern society? The truth hurts.

The science of driving directions | The New Yorker

For bin Laden and his followers the weapons of terrorism are no longer simply the guns and bombs that they always have been, but now include the mini-cam and videotape, editing suite and attendant production facilities; professionally produced and mass-marketed CD-Roms and DVDs; and, most critically, the lap-top and desk-top computers, CD burners and e-mail accounts, and Internet and worldwide web access that have defined the information revolution today.

Indeed, in recent years, the art of terrorist communication has evolved to a point where the terrorists themselves can now control the entire production process: determining the content, context and medium over which their message is projected; and towards precisely the audience (or multiple audiences) they seek to reach. The implications of this development are enormous.

A new information revolution has occurred to empower these movements with the ability to shape and disseminate their own message in their own way: enabling them to bypass completely traditional, established media outlets. As Tina Brown, the doyenne of post-modern media, has pointed out: the ‘conjunction of 21st-century Internet speed and 12th-century fanaticism has turned our world into a tinderbox.’

Testimony presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on May 4, 2006.

RAND | Testimonies | The Use of the Internet by Islamic Extremists

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So why did Porter Goss suddenly resign as head of the CIA? Is it because he's somehow implicated with the Brent Wilkes hooker scandal? Or does it have something to do with his deputy, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who's already been implicated in Hookergate? Let's round up the scuttlebutt

Goss is Out -- Why? | The Washington Monthly

“The Proposition,” in its morality as well as in its geography, is not just basic but Biblical. Directed by John Hillcoat, it shows humanity striving for a New Testament way of life with a Cain-and-Abel drama on the doorstep. Captain Stanley is married to the pearl-skinned Martha (Emily Watson), who solemnly serves him poached eggs for breakfast and somehow, perhaps from another hemisphere, conjures a Christmas tree. “I’m a very resourceful woman,” she says. Their marriage is one of baffled and perspiring tenderness; even as Stanley tells her to stay in their lonely house, where Tobey (Rodney Boschman), the Aboriginal manservant, prunes red roses in front of a white picket fence, she longs to know more. You look at that fence, and at the ravishing sight of Martha at dusk, book in hand, wandering the all but grassless plain, and you can’t help thinking of the Australian outback as the last redoubt of the Western.

Anthony Lane on The Proposition | The New Yorker

For the past ten years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people. The last page is always reserved for phone numbers, and the second to last I use for gift ideas.

MEMENTO MORI, by DAVID SEDARIS | The New Yorker

I had seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life. Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents and their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. I was six years old. You were nine.

ONCE IN A LIFETIME, by JHUMPA LAHIRI | The New Yorker

If housing futures work the way they’re supposed to, they will shift risk from those who are less able to bear it (individual homeowners with hefty mortgages) to those who are more willing to (speculators looking for a big upside on their investments). In the process, they will effectively provide a form of house-price insurance. They could have wider benefits, too. If there is a housing bubble, and it does burst, housing futures would soften the blow to the national economy. If enough traders participated in the market, it would become, in the long run, a valuable predictor of housing prices in different cities. That would allow buyers to make more rational decisions about how much they were willing to pay for homes, which would make house prices swing less wildly than they currently do.

THROUGH THE ROOF, by James Surowiecki | The New Yorker

A couple has been given permission to use fertility treatment to create a "saviour sibling" for their seriously-ill 20-month-old daughter.

Couple win right to 'saviour sibling'

For anyone who missed The Proposition in the cinema recently, I’d seriously recommend it. It’s released in various US cities over the coming weeks (if anyone reading this is based there) and there’s an excellent interview with Nick Cave, who wrote it, on Salon this week. The DVD is set for release on this side of the Atlantic in July.

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