In honor of Sunday's holiday, I asked an array of writers and other web folk to share stories that demonstrate the awesomeness of their particular moms. They've copy edited our work, made us the tacos that we like, hugged us into feeling better, made sure we were alive, inspired us in our own careers, and generally made us better people. Moms are awesome.
According to the lastest estimate, the Internet consists of trillions of individual pages in hundreds of different languages, but a paper appearing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argues that it takes no more than 19 clicks to navigate from one page to what it estimates to be the 13,999,999,999,999 other publicly accessible web pages out there.
Michelle Rhee on her school-voucher conversion, Ramesh Ponnuru on the hidden cost of reusable grocery bags, Joe Nocera on the N.C.A.A., Evgeny Morozov on Wikipedia and social change, and Jonathan Chait on the GOP electoral scheme.
To commemorate the week that has passed since the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, social-media influencers and major organizations attempted — emphasis on attempted — to pause for a virtual moment of silence Friday morning.
If you have or are part of something called a "family," you can bet that someone's going to want, need, and expect a photo of the two or three or five or 17 of you this season. And these days, they expect you looking cheery and doing something fun.
Once you've voted there's not much else to do on Election Day other than sit around and wait for results to actually start pouring in. So what better way to get through this time than to click on some mindless election-related single-serving websites?
Ten years after someone first wrote a Wikipedia entry for Philip Roth's best-selling novel The Human Stain, published in 2000, the great author has discovered the latest entry and he is not happy. As with many Wikipedia articles, this one includes details that are not wholly agreed upon by all—or, necessarily, any—of those involved.
Corners of the internet are pretty excited this morning about a photo making the rounds, one that seems to show dowdy old Prince Charles of England gleefully chasing a honey boo boo-esque child who is holding a bottle of bubbles.
Everyone is complaining about Olympics spoilers. But are they really that bad? We discuss.
Proposed legislation in New York State hopes to rid the Internet of mean, anonymous commenters. But do we really want to get rid of those people, even if we can?
Thursday I wrote an innocent post, proffering an opinion, the simple opinion of one blogger. I came down against the corgi.
For at least one person, Slate's Hanna Rosin, The Berenstain Bears were horrid regressive devils, and Berenstain's death merits a contrarian essay about the books' awfulness, complete with the phrase "good riddance." Good riddance? Good grief.
Today on the (much) lighter side of political news: A cat named Hank is running for Congress in Virginia. Minus the fact that he's a cat, he's doing what every modern-day politician dreams of: Going viral.
Members of the House Judiciary Committee decided on Friday to table the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) until 2012 -- however, in a somewhat sneaky last minute move, Rep. Lamar Smith scheduled an early morning hearing on Wednesday to try one more time to push the bill through.
BuzzFeed, which has spent its life building an encyclopedia of other people's greatest Web hits, has hired away one of the key reporters from the website Politico, to be its new editor-in-chief and build their own original news division. Smith, who was one of the first hires at Politico five years ago, said there are plans to hire a dozen more reporters.
Facebook has mined its rather sizable treasure trove of data and users to reveal what were the most talked about topics on the social network in 2011.
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