(New “Mad Men” Sergey Brin and Larry Page | Source: Creative Commons) The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: “First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was […]

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(Source: Pew) The lobby is reeling. Reports from Capitol Hill reveal that AIPAC’s big lobbying day for war with Syria changed no votes. Not one. Meanwhile two of its closest allies, Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Henry Waxman changed their position on bombing from “yes” to undecided. Another, Rep. Alan Grayson, is the leader of […]

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The news of Steve Ballmer’s planned retirement next year, announced last month, brought the Microsoft CEO’s critics out of the woodwork. He was widely skewered as the beneficiary of “the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history”—down the hall from Bill Gates when both were Harvard undergrads. Vanity Fair business writer Kurt Eichenwald called Ballmer’s watch at […]

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(Source: Wikipedia) Americans are optimistic sorts. That makes it hard to fathom Haiti’s grim circumstances, even though the country is just 700 miles from Miami. This article was originally published in OtherWords and appears here by way of special arrangement. Business there is controlled by a handful of elite repressive families, the infrastructure doesn’t support […]

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(Source: Bill deBlasio) Victory creates an ex post facto sense of inevitability, so it’s worth remembering how unlikely Bill DeBlasio’s Democratic primary win seemed just a few months ago when Christine Quinn was still thought to be Bloomberg’s anointed successor. Last spring, I went to a forum at New York Law School where all the […]

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