Dylan Tweney

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Monterey, Calif. is a terrific, mind-expanding experience for all who attend. Or so I’ve heard: The $6,000 price tag has, so far, kept it well out of my reach. That’s why I checked out the Bil Conference, also in Monterey, a free, t

This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve edited in a long time: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib. Kim Zetter did the interview with Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist who is famous/notorious for his 1971 “Stanford prison experiment,” a psychology study in which some students

For people who love punctuation, there’s always something to grieve about: Humans have trouble understanding semicolons, and computers can’t handle apostrophes. Fortunately, there is the Semicolon Appreciation Society for those of us who know and love this mark.

Brendan Vaughan’s collection of real-life tales of ingenuity, What Would MacGyver Do?, recently republished by Penguin, has a great premise: It’s a collection of true stories featuring the kind of situational hacking (bombs defused with paperclips, sheds converted into aircraft) that the TV show Mac

Thanks to the hard-working PR team at Wired, I’ve been in the media several times in the past few days: Business News Network – a short video segment Friday about the Microsoft bid for Yahoo (video is near the bottom of that page, requires a Windows machine, and will only be available for a week) […

I got to speak for about five minutes on WBUR’s “Here and Now” radio program earlier this week about the future of television — an ironic topic for those who know me, since I’m definitely not much of a TV watcher. The irony gets even thicker because halfway through the interview I found myself sayin

10. You’re not a real person, and you’re just following me as a way to get me to check out your spammy Twitter page and then click through to your adult dating site. 9. Egregious self-promotion: You post tweets about every single blog post you publish. I already have an RSS newsreader, ok? 8. You […

There are a lot of reasons not to like the MacBook Air, but most of them are missing the point, because it’s a luxury item aimed at executives, journalists, and perhaps people in the fashion and hospitality industries. It’s also Apple’s first volley in the ultraportable market, and others are sure t

When Wired profiled Gawker Media founder Nick Denton in June 2004, we explained how he was strategically deploying “Movable Type, sexual prurience, and relentless snarkiness to draw enough of a crowd to lure advertisers.” That was back when Gawker consisted of just four blogs. Now there are 14. We c

Monster Cable threw a massive party for its favorite retailers Tuesday night at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. The entertainment? Nothing less than six-time Grammy winner Mary J. Blige, who held nothing back in an intense, soulful, high-energy 19-song set, supported by a five-piece band and three bac

I love the high, faux-literary tone of this spam message I received today. Its content is essentially the same as many Nigerian wire fraud scams … but the language is awfully high-flown. Where do they come up with this stuff? From: Lady Catherine Levett, 4 Old Church Street, Chelsea, SW3, England. H

At Wired, we’ve been experimenting with what we loosely call “open source journalism” in a variety of ways. What we’re learning is that there’s a fairly natural flow from quick blog posts to more fully-cooked news stories, and it works something like this. A reporter finds out about a breaking news