Chronicles of Narnia is a pretty good movie, with some truly beautiful visual effects (especially those to do with snow, fur, and talking animals). But Tilda Swinton as the White Witch is an awesome villain, maybe one of the greats — right up there with Darth Vader and Khan. I was cheering for her t

When you install iTunes for Windows, it defaults to the setting that automatically keeps your iPod in sync with your iTunes library. That means if your computer doesn’t have much music on it, and you plug in an iPod that you’d topped off with music from another computer, all the music on your iPod w

Steve Jobs: tightfisted rich bastard? Wired News: Jobs vs. Gates: Who’s the Star?

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond: The Diamond Mountain Blog: The Heart Sutra: Kirtan

I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s album Chavez Ravine for about half a year now. It’s an amazing album — an impressionistic, lively, even danceable historical tour through the Chavez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles — a predominantly Mexican neighborhood that was bulldozed in the 1950s to make ro

Set among the servants and masters in a huge, old Irish castle during World War II, this is a masterfully-written, very modern, short novel (published 1945) with beautiful, restrained description and pitch-perfect dialogue. There’s very little interiority–you almost never learn what the characters a

Seven years ago, I started a company called Utipia with two other people: a fellow journalist, and a talented developer who happened to be my brother. We wrote a business plan, raised some money from friends and family, incorporated, and built a working demo to show how our clever content could be c

My story on the Sony Reader and the e-book market is the lead story on Wired News this morning. Check it out! Wired News: Screening the Latest Bestseller Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despi

Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions. Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wonderi

History, from the kingdom of Akkad all the way to Earl Scruggs: Banjo Ancestors: The Lutes of West Africa, By Shlomo Pestcoe

In case you were wondering what the life of a freelancer is like, here’s John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice. (Note that by “Utterly Useless” he actually means “Incredibly Long-Winded.”)

Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda What can I say? I haven’t felt this transformed by a collection of essays since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book, The Man Who Ate Everything. Like Steingarten, Dirda has an infectious enthusiasm for his topic (for Dirda it’s literature, instead of food); an i