Charles Mann offers a big story in the latest issue of the Atlantic. It's 11,000 words, and it's based around an audacious premise: the end of energy scarcity. The peg for the story is Japan's ongoing research on methane hydrate, an amalgam of natural gas trapped in water ice that occurs in oceans around the [...]

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Some years back, I gave a talk at O'Reilly's ETech conference that urged the audience to spend less time thinking up clever ways dissidents could blog secretly from inside repressive regimes and more time thinking about the importance of ordinary participatory media tools, like blogs, Facebook and YouTube, for activism. I argued that the tools [...]

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Cultural critic David Rieff uses my new book, Rewire: Digital Cosmpolitans in the Age of Connection, as a jumping off point for a screed against "techno-utopians" - and, near as I can tell, the very idea of progress - in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. I'm a little surprised that Rieff has grouped me [...]

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I spent last week in Senegal at a board meeting for Open Society Foundation, meeting organizations the foundation supports around the continent. Two projects in particular stuck in my mind. One is Y'en a Marre ("Fed Up"), a Senegalese activist organization led by hiphop artists and journalists, who worked to register voters and oust long-time [...]

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Last week was a stressful, dreadful one, not just for people in Boston who lost friends in the marathon bombing and a colleague when Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed. It was a dreadful week in Iraq, a week that featured a massacre in Syria and an industrial explosion in West, Texas that killed [...]

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This is a hard day to write about issues other than sudden, unexpected disasters - the bombing in Boston, the earthquake in Iran - and horrific ongoing disasters of continuing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But I've been trying to get my head around a complicated situation in Bangladesh that's become very dangerous for [...]

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I'm in Dakar, Senegal this week for a meeting of Open Society Foundation's Global Board, along with the boards of our four African foundations (East Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa, South Africa). The formal meetings begin today, but for the past two days, we've been visiting grantees and projects in Senegal, including an ambitious election-monitoring [...]

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Bruce Schneier is one of the world's leading cryptographers and theorists of security. Jonathan Zittrain is a celebrated law professor, theorist of digital technology and wonderfully performative lecturer. The two share a stage at Harvard Law School's Langdell Hall. JZ introduces Bruce as the inventor of the phrase "security theatre", author of a leading textbook [...]

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Wow! 35 of you contributed more than 70 possible hashtags for me to use while discussing my new book. I don't have a final choice, but here are my 12 favorites, and the folks who'll be receiving advance reading copies of the book. I'll try to reach you via Twitter, but if you're on this [...]

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My book, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, comes out on June 10th on Kindle, June 17th in hardcover. My publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, has evidently just shipped out large pile of proofs to readers. I've deduced this by watching a small stream of Twitter users posting photos of their review [...]

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