April 28th, 2008

The Mugging, One Year Later (Almost)

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I was waiting my turn in the satellite studio at Fox on Sunday — to talk about microtargeting — when I noticed that the woman currently on camera looked familiar. Yes! It was Laura Ingel, who I hadn’t seen until the day of the iPhone release last June. It was Laura who was interviewing me live on Fox in front of the Apple Store on 58th Street when some crazy dude slipped behind us, grabbed the mike from her, and took off. He was quickly taken down by the cameraman, and got busted. Everybody was a bit shaken but Laura, a total pro, gathered herself in an instant and restarted our interview.

I tried to explain this to the pleasant production assistant who was in charge of me, and realized that I had the perfect audio-visual aid, my iPhone. I called up the YouTube video of the mugging and impressed the newsroom. When Laura was done her hit, she greeted me like an old friend and told me that she was following the case against the mugger. Apparently, he was charged with a felony and has gone through two lawyers.

She says that in part because of the incident, she’s avoided getting an iPhone. Or is she just waiting for 3G? Anyway, she wrote a sweet blog item about our reunion.

March 20th, 2008

Job Posting

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Yes, I’m joining Wired later this spring. I’ll be concentrating on longer stories, and doing what I can to help out with what is already a great operation.

It’s been a wonderful run at Newsweek. For twelve years I’ve covered what I think is the hottest story on the planet for a magazine that’s one of the prime outlets in journalism. But when I was among those offered a buyout (based on age and years of service) I saw it as an opportunity to think about what might be a next step. The logical, as well as the karmic, choice was Wired. I’ve been involved with the magazine from the very beginning; Kevin Kelley assigned a story to me before issue 1.0 came out fifteen years ago. I was on the masthead of that first issue as contributing writer, and stayed there since. The story, about cypherpunks, was on the cover of the second issue and got me going on my book Crypto. I wrote several other big cryptography stories for Wired as well as stories on General Magic and other stuff. Wired has excerpted two of my books: Insanely Great, and The Perfect Thing. In the past few years, I’ve done a series of long profiles for Wired that I’m really proud of, about Stephen Wolfram, Larry Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, and Nick Denton. I really like what the current editors have done with Wired, and I hope to have crazy fun being a part of it. After I complete some stories I’ve already set in motion at Newsweek over the next few weeks, I’ll make the move a few blocks downtown to the magazine’s New York offices. But I’ll also be spending more time on the West Coast, doing research for my Wired stories and also for a book I’m reporting on a company named Google.

March 15th, 2008

An Awesome Talk

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A few weeks ago, I attended the TED conference in Monterey, California. (Here’s my writeup of the first couple of days, posted on newsweek.com.) During the first day, I had to go offsite to see a really interesting product demo nearby, so I tried to pick a time where I would miss only one of the 18-minute talks. I should have known that this is a foolish thing to do at TED, because often the best talks seem to come out of nowhere. In this case, the one I missed was from neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. When I returned, it was clear that I’d made a big mistake. This talk was universally cited as an all-time TED highlight. People described it as a brain expert recounting the story of her own stroke, and the conflict between a scientist wanting to document a phenomenon and a human being who had to get help for a potentially fatal situation.

TED has now posted the video of the talk, and I can say it is much more than that, a moving and illuminating 18 minutes.

Dr. Taylor has a book about her experience.

March 9th, 2008

Into Thin Air

How embarrassing for me. I’ve lost the review unit of the MacBook Air loaned to me by Apple. I had written my review (with a lead that was somewhat controversial) and was still, um, testing it. It came in handy when I needed to run some book scanning software that only worked on Windows XP–the computers in my office run only Windows 2000 (our main corporate system) or Vista (the other machine I have to test stuff). The Air ran XP nicely in Boot Camp. But then it was gone.

What happened to it? I posit the following theory in this Newsweek column: it was tossed out with the newspapers.

January 24th, 2008

Stupid Blogger Tricks

Lots of bloggers are smart. Some are experts with ideas that illuminate a subject. Some do good reporting.

And there there are some that are so lazy that… well, consider this. There’s a site called Mac Complainer that apparently disses Apple on a persistent basis. They used the three reviews of the Macbook Air that appeared yesterday — all three of which, including mine, were positive with some reservations — as apparent evidence that the Air was foul. Here is the level of criticism.

It’s practically unanimous: MacBook Air sucks. Apple hasn’t sucked in a long time but it sucks now, resoundingly. Steven Levy’s review for Newsweek is the nail in MBA’s coffin: “These omissions are troubling–especially to someone in a down-turning economy deciding whether to spend a premium sum for a computer with subpremium storage. Still, simply using the MacBook Air, as I’m doing right now in writing this review, is rather copasetic.” Anyone know what copasetic means?

Ten seconds on Google would have supplied the answer to that question. The freedictionary.com would have told this person that copasetic is not a perjorative, but means “totally satisfactory.” Adding to this comedy of boneheadedness is that the comment got picked up on Digg, with the headline “Newsweek’s Steven Levy says using Macbook Air is ‘Copasetic,’ with an explanation that “Steven Levy is only one of the major reviewers that dislikes MacBook Air.” Why? Because I said that using it is a “copasetic” experience! Help!