As reported on The Verge. By Casey Newton Sleazy tabloid links have taken over the web — but their days may be numbered Reading news online over the past year, I came to realize that more or less every story now includes a beautiful woman. Tucked into modules with names like “around the web” or “you might like,” there she is, demonstrating her bosom or backside or pearly-white smile. Often she is a celebrity, talking about…
As reported on The Verge. by Leigh Cowart Behind boxing’s brain damage crisis At 46, “Terrible” Terry Norris has the lean, muscled frame of a former pro boxer. He’s just a little taller than average, with a thick, black Van Dyke framing a bright smile. Gray creeps in at the edges of his beard, but his shaved head seems the only concession to age, a paring away of the intricately razored box cut of his heyday,…
As reported on Engadget. BY ROSS RUBIN In the heyday of Palm organizers, when even the speeds of 3G data seemed like a distant fantasy, a debate raged as to whether the future of pocket devices could belong to one or two devices. Those who favored two devices argued that you didn’t really want all the bulk and battery consumption of a pocket computer in a small device that you wanted to use primarily to make…
As reported on TechCrunch. by Leena Rao Imagine your business is down to its last stretch of runway and your investors refuse to put more cash into it. Your friends and your most trusted advisers tell you that it’s probably time to throw in the towel, but as a last-ditch effort to find some capital, you decide to take the company public. You are half-certain that the company will go completely bankrupt during the actual roadshow,…
As reported on The Verge. By Sean Hollister Nearly 20 years after he finished the beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson has gone back to the drawing board for one more panel. Watterson has contributed the movie poster for Stripped, a new documentary about cartoonists struggling with the death of newspapers and the future of the medium. There, he joins such a host of fellow comic strip legends such as Jim Davis of Garfield fame, Cathy Guisewite of Cathy,…
As reported on The Verge. By Adrianne Jeffries At this year’s CES, women in tight skirts are back on the floor — but the booth bro and booth bot are catching up It’s pretty common to see scantily clad women at trade shows for industries dominated by men, and CES, the electronics trade show that lures around 150,000 people every January, is typically no different. But last year, for whatever reason — maybe it…
As reported on TechCrunch. by John Biggs After blindly supporting it for a number of years, I’ve decided to crowdfund my own project, a novel that I wrote for my son, and thenwrite about the experience for you guys. Today I’d like to talk about my own experiences in publishing and why I think crowdfunding is, at the very least, a viable alternative to the traditional models. Be warned: this is a little introspective and I’m…
As reported on The Verge. By Lessley Anderson Why a San Francisco community is disregarding mainstream medicine and putting its children at risk In San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood, some 200 students from kindergarten to the eighth grade attend classes at the private San Francisco Waldorf School. On any given afternoon outside of the cheerful, modern white building, parents congregate to wait for their kids. Chit-chat includes the typical fodder like play dates and birthdays,…
As reported on The Verge. By Matt Stroud Texas and other states fight to get their fix In 1998, Michael Yowell was convicted of killing his parents while trying to steal their money to buy drugs. After the killings, he was arrested and charged with murder. Since he lived in Texas, it was a capital offense; he was eventually convicted and sentenced to death. At the beginning of this month, after 15 years of waiting on…
As reported on TechCrunch. by MG SIEGLER A simple link. That’s all it took to unleash a hailstorm of angry emails, messages, tweets, and comments. Why? I dared wonder if libraries will continue to exist in the future. I mean, it’s not that crazy a notion, right? (Ifyou’re a librarian, you’re not allowed to answer that.) Last Monday, I linked to this piece by Art Brodsky for Wired from my blog. In it, he argues that beyond the recent hoopla around e-book pricing, the…