Dylan Tweney

Just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for 5 years — my first post was November 4, 1999, using Blogger — quite the novelty at the time. I blogged pretty regularly up until April 2000, then sporadically for the rest of that year (and, sadly, much of the archives from mid-late 2000 got lost […

Is it just me, or is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) seeming more and more like one of those unstoppable monster-movie zombies that just keeps coming at you no matter how many times you knock him down? Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill

By popular demand: Clara’s “bad face” costume for Halloween. Here she is with Mara, the purple princess.

Michelle Goldberg’s longish piece in Salon is the most thoughtful reaction to the whole Red State-Blue State divide that I’ve seen yet: If at first you don’t secede. Honestly, I’m a bit irritated by the recent flood of gratuitous fuck-yous and pathetic disavowals; both seem divisive and unproductive

The onslaught of comment spam on my Movable Type blog finally made me scream uncle: I switched to WordPress this weekend. MT is an amazingly flexible tool, but it is slow, slow, slow, and it’s not set up well to deal with comment spam. It takes several minutes just to delete a single comment–and the

State-by-state election returns make the U.S. look like a deeply divided country–red Republicans in the South and middle; blue Democrats on the coasts. (The division is eerily reminiscent of the division between free and slave states before the Civil War–how long the shadows of that ugly history are

Indian farmers have discovered that spraying their fields with Coca-Cola may be as effective as–and lots cheaper than–spraying with pesticides. An Indian agronomist says: “I think Coke has found its right use. Farmers have traditionally used sugary solutions to attract red ants to feed on insect lar

Get ready to meet the next big innovation in mobile communications technology: the hinge. The Sierra Wireless Voq Professional phone is a rather ordinary-looking, somewhat bulky handset with a traditional 12-button keypad. Flip back the keypad and you reveal a miniscule QWERTY keyboard concealed ins

Research in Motion turned the corporate world on its ear with the first BlackBerry pagers, which gave middle managers the power to hound subordinates 24/7, no matter where in the world the expense account took them. Later, RIM grafted mobile phone capabilities onto its pagers, producing functional —

Remember the John Woo movie Face/Off, where John Travolta and Nicholas Cage trade faces? Well, it isn’t science fiction any more.

Jacques Derrida is dead. The Telegraph has an intelligent and balanced review of his life and work. Derrida’s work had a huge influence on my college education, and it was always clear to me that his own writing was far more precise — and humane — than that of his American imitators. I am sorry […]