... place — which suggests Jobs had little patience for politics or perhaps even society. There's just the device and the user. Much more on Jobs' aesthetics and politics here in Evgeny Morozov's brilliant review of Walter Isaacson's recent Jobs biography.

As Evgeny Morozov writes in "The Net Delusion," repressive governments are becoming smarter about how to control and influence the information environment online, going as far as to track dissidents and hack their communications.

When the United States attempts to makes its own versions of hit U.K. shows, we always seem to fail (The Office notwithstanding). America’s Got Talent has given us no Susan Boyle equivalent, and we remember the mercifully short-lived U.S. Coupling primarily as a cautionary tale. And so it was with trepidation that I learned that my precious My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, a British reality show highlighting the over-the-top celebrations, traditional gender roles, and midriffs of the U.K.’s Romany Gypsies and Irish travelers, was due for an American makeover.

"Anyone who thinks we will be using Roundup [a herbicide] in eight [thousand] to 10000 years is foolish," argued organic evangelist Jeff Moyer, farm director the Rodale Institute, at the New America Foundation event. But there is unlikely to be a ...