The New Republic

It seems that we have finally decided to have a moment of reckoning about drones. In Washington, hard questions are being asked about the president’s kill lists of militants in Pakistan and Yemen. READ MORE >>

In the history of commerce, only one corporation could fairly be compared to a major religion, in that it's amassed a devoted following and often is a source of public debate: Apple. But what happens to a group of believers when the object of their devotion disappoints them? READ MORE >>

On his third day at Stanford, Aaron Swartz forced himself to attend a party. He wasn’t interested in having a good time—in fact, crowds of strangers made him anxious. He merely wanted to document the mating rituals of the “teenager,” a species that alternatively mystified and horrified him. READ MORE >>

The explosion of a large meteor over a medium-sized city would have been worldwide news at any time in the modern era, but something peculiar to this historical moment made the Chelyabinsk blast a global sensation. Friday's event marked the first time that a large meteor fall has been filmed by hundreds of cameras. This was accomplished spectacularly, thanks to the sudden ubiquity of small videocameras and video-equipped cellphones, and the Russian fad for dashboard-mounted cameras. READ MORE >>

When anyone bemoans the prevalence of negative advertising in political campaigns, there’s an easy reply: It works. That’s not always true in the corporate world. Just take Microsoft’s ongoing blitz of attacks on Google, which launched last Thanksgiving under the cutesy tagline “Scroogled!” READ MORE >>

Despite the many hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Aaron Swartz since his suicide last month, there remain a number of unanswered questions about the life of the computer-prodigy-turned-political-activist. READ MORE >>

Let no one fault local governments for hiding from the networked era. Nearly every official and government agency in a major metro area uses Facebook and Twitter, and some cities have hosted app development contests to get their citizens coming up with ways to use public data for good. Local electeds can even establish their popular bona fides simply through the assiduous use of social media. READ MORE >>

Last month, China Daily, the country’s main English-language paper, reported that the People’s Republic might lift its 13-year-old ban on video game consoles. READ MORE >>

There are two ways to be wrong about the Internet. One is to embrace cyber-utopianism and treat the Internet as inherently democratizing. Just leave it alone, the argument goes, and the Internet will destroy dictatorships, undermine religious fundamentalism, and make up for failures of institutions.1 READ MORE >>

During the most heated days of the Tahrir Square protests, Andy Carvin sent more than 1,000 tweets per day. He kept at it for 18 hours at a time, aggregating and crowdsourcing information from activists, freedom fighters, and (citizen) journalists. He submitted to sleep only as a biological necessity. READ MORE >>