Archive for November, 2011

America clamps down on online anonymity, the last refuge of Mexico’s free press Blog Del Narco The last time I went to Mexico I was mugged at gunpoint on the same day that the country’s anti-drug czar was found to be a paid informant for its cartels. Since then, things have become so much worse [...]

The view from Burning Man: in the Black Rock Desert, it is better to be awesome than rich Jon EvansThe Heart Machine I’m just back from Burning Man, the surreal festival of 50,000 artists, anarchists, hippies, ravers, engineers, and gawkers who gather annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to build a temporary city, throw the [...]

© Tim Hetherington Last week I saw Restrepo, the Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington fly-on-the-wall documentary about a US infantry unit stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a.k.a. “the most dangerous place on Earth.” Junger and Hetherington follow the troops as they exchange fire with and call in airstrikes on the omnipresent Taliban, try to justify c […]

Three years ago, when the Amazon Kindle was little more than a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye, I wrote an article for The Walrus called “Apocalypse Soon: The future of reading.” In it, I lamented how my book publishers had prevented me from releasing my debut novel online, and predicted an e-book revolution, the rise [...]

Last week a computerized voice at TD Canada Trust called to inform me that my ATM card’s security had been compromised, and I had to come get a new one; meanwhile, my old card had been deactivated. This irritated me, not least because it was the second such call in three weeks. So I did [...]