Your Local Internet

I watched the opening ceremony from the roof of a friend’s narrowboat, near King’s Cross, northwest of the Olympic Park. Boat dwellers have had a rough time under the Olympic regime; many of the boats moored opposite us were exiles from the waterways around the Park, displaced because they...

When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, “the problem that has no name” was the problem of college-educated housewives sitting at home being bored to death.  Today, the “problem that has no name” is more widespread, more alluring and more aggressive. Its most insidious aspect is how...

We all understand why free online music sharing is controversial. Musicians make a living by selling their work, and widespread unauthorized sharing could slash their revenue. File sharers respond with evidence that obscurity is more costly than piracy, for those below the rank of superstar, and that unauthorized online...

The publisher Collins has recently adopted crowd-sourcing as a lexicographical tool, inviting members of the public to propose new words for its online dictionary. Some of their suggestions, like howlerious and crapalicious, are reminiscent of the Blackadder episode where Edmund torments Dr Johnson with a string of absurd neologisms.

From the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony From Inside Story: This is a slow country to move. After seven years of preparation, months of publicity, weeks of fractiousness and days of panic, Britain had still not quite adjusted itself to the idea that it was to play host to...

Sometime last year, the New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system, which had been used to request books for more than a century. This change was made without ceremony or fanfare; I learned of it unexpectedly, when I walked into the catalog room prepared to deliver a...

Banksy by Chloe Veltman The Library of Congress is consistently giving me more to snack on during my lunch breaks than mere sandwiches and coffee. I get food for thought here on a regular basis. Right now, I am sitting on the sixth floor of the Madison Building listening...

by Justin E. H. Smith One question  I keep coming back to here is the way in which natural language influences our metaphysics of individuation. Differences between different natural languages on this point are most in evidence, I think, in the way we talk about food, in particular, which...

L-R: David Mamet and Gilad Atzmon by James Warner Reading Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who? immediately after David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, I was surprised to find the two books, written from vehemently opposed political viewpoints, nonetheless reminded me of each other. Does Mamet’s need to see the Israelis...

by Joe Linker I knew about The Tribes of Palos Verdes (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) when it first came out, and I was interested in reading it for what appeared to be its local surf setting. We used to go snorkel diving in the coves around Palos Verdes, the...

The “network” of which we speak is comprised of contingent logical and physical strata: applications and content; the higher level protocols and services implemented in software, and the lower substrate network or “physical layer”, comprising physical hardware such as channels, routers, storage and processing technologies and resources such as...

I take a position on filesharing and the free exchange of copyrighted works that surprises many people I meet. Because I’m a writer, they assume that I oppose all forms of unauthorized copying and distribution, that I resent anyone who wants to “steal” my work, and that I’m afraid...

From The Threepenny Review: It is a nostalgic poem, so let me start with my own memory of it. Seventeen or so years ago, I came to The Waste Land in the way I then came to most poems—high on caffeine, late at night, crouched on the floor of...

I am growing ever more convinced that a great deal can be learned about a culture by looking at the way it exercises its control over the exchange of fluids. I'm not talking about semen and menstrual blood (though surely those too). I'm talking about alcohol, soda water, fruit...

by Legacy Russell Poet Richard Siken begins his “Dirty Valentine” by confessing, “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. / I touch myself, I dream.” I do, too. We live in a confessional culture wherein the most detailed minutiae of everyday life is splayed...