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.

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.

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.

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

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!

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I had the honor and pleasure of editing The Best of Technology Writing, 2007, an anthology published by the digitalculture imprint of the University of Michigan Press. For those who want to dip in and sample, the contents are available online. Or you can get it sent to you, piece by piece to read on your iPhone or Blackberry or on email, via DailyLit.
Here is where you can read my introduction, where I talk about how technology writing has changed in the past twenty years. I also address where tech writing stands vis a vis mainstream media versus blogs.
I am also delighted to hand over the editing chores for the next volume of the series to Clive Thompson. Reading over the stories for possible selection in this year’s volume, there were several of his that were totally worthy of inclusion. (The one I chose was a terrific story about Gordon Bell’s scheme to preserve our memories.) Clive is a great choice to edit The Best of Technology Writing 2008. But he needs your help. What were the best tech stories you read (or wrote) this year, either online or off? Please send your nominations here.

And don’t forget–this year’s volume would make a lovely holiday gift for your more literate loved ones.

At least one blogger who you’d think would know better described my Newsweek cover story on the “Future of Reading,” using Amazon’s Kindle as a peg, as a “review.” Weird. Anyway, I did so a Kindle review (nowhere near as lengthy as the cover piece!) which you can link to here.

I did this week’s Newsweek’s cover story on The Future of Reading, using Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device as a peg to discuss some profound changes that will take place in reading over the next few decades.

If you go to Newsweek’s site linked to above, you’ll see plenty about it. But checking out some online comments about the device, I thought I’d make a point here. Because Amazon had to file for FCC approval, some details of the book, along with a picture, wound up on Engadget. Because the picture was taken at an angle that make the device look like it was dominated by the keyboard — and the picture generally is not flattering –some people are calling it ugly. In person, the Kindle is, in my opinion, pretty attractive. And since I’ve had the thing for a few weeks, I’ve had the experience of showing it to people who haven’t seen it at all. I watch carefully to see their first, gut reaction. In just about every case it is a positive, visceral response to the product design.

This reminds me of what happened to the new iPod nano, where a picture also leaked out that was accurate, but unflattering. When I actually saw the new nano, it was interesting that it was (a) yes, the one I saw in the leaked picture, which looked ugly and (b) anything but ugly — a classic Apple techno-lust product.

Lesson: wait to you see actually see the thing (or at least some pictures make by real product photographers) before you judge it as beastly.

Funny story about another soul fooled by the prospect of a Beatles-iTunes deal in last week’s iPod announcement. It certainly was clear to those who were at the event that we would not be seeing Sir Paul perform, when Steve J’s examples in his demos were very heavy on John Lennon solo work, and at one point he even gushed how much he loved John.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Steve last January after the Macworld Expo event where he introduced the iPhone. I tell this story in the afterword to my paperback edition of The Perfect Thing, which is now available. There was a lot of talk about a Beatles announcement back then, too, and Jobs’s demos had several Beatle songs in them. But no Paul. After the show in our interview, Steve was showing me something on Apple TV, and it was playing that new Beatles “Love” album. Steve mentioned how much he liked it. I asked him whether it was a dream of his that one day after a keynote or product launch, he would be able to bring out Paul McCartney to perform. “No,” he said deadpan. “My dream would be to bring out John Lennon.”

The usual disclaimer: don’t try this at home.