We are a society of listers. Grocery lists, to-do lists, bestsellers lists, the “25 Random Things About Me” meme on Facebook that generated almost 5 million notes in one week. Mainstream magazines feature them, entire websites are devoted to them. Even museums have begun celebrating them: the Smithsonian organized an exhibition two years ago titled, simply, “Lists,” which featured examples of the form by the likes of H.L. Mencken and Picasso. (The latter’s handwritten 1912 list recommended artists for inclusion in the first-ever Armory Show.) The year before that, the Louvre invited Italian writer Umberto Eco to curate an exhibition and event series based on a theme of his choosing. His idea? “The Infinity of Lists.” READ MORE

"According to a survey, one in four of us have regretted posting something on a social media site, mainly because it was inappropriate or upset someone. Around 40 per cent of 2,000 polled said they used websites such as Twitter and Facebook to speak up on an issue they felt passionate about. Almost half believed that what they said had made a difference." READ MORE

It sounds outlandish, doesn't it, that, forty-some years after we stopped seizing obscene books, the government would get back into the censorship game all over again—and in a big way. But it's already happened: as you'll surely remember with horror, the Department of Homeland Security seized some websites over claims of copyright infringement—and then held them in limbo for a year, stonewalling with the legal system. That went just so well: we're sure that the U.S. government is oh-so-prepared to start seizing websites on a mass scale. READ MORE

Scroll through the blog Crazy Days and Nights (CDAN) and you’ll find a number of innocuous items—red carpet photos of waving actors, well-worn bits of celebrity news. It seems as if the blog is made up of information you can find repeated elsewhere ad infinitum until you come across the nuggets of gossip gold: the blind items. READ MORE

Professional Internet troll Katie Roiphe has been on a tear! (If you missed her pre-Christmas salvo, "We Like Rapey Movies Because They Help All of Us to Keep Thinking Of Ourselves as Victims Even Though None of Us Actually Are, Because Rape Is So Vanishingly Rare," well, enjoy!) Now for the new year she's back, with a column called "Turning Off the Internet Is Impossible but Even Though We Actually Can, Thanks to Cool Tools, But Really It Is Illusory, Because Our Very Minds Are Different Now, and We Will Live Only Inside the Internet Forever"! It's actually a weird plea about human helplessness, or her own helplessness, which pretty much contradicts her other work, which more regularly maintains that helplessness (and sexual harassment in the workplace) doesn't actually exist so much. Importantly, however, she makes reference to the recent Pico Iyer essay in the Times, concluding, quite snippily, for her, that: "Freedom, then"—and she means the computer program that shuts off your Internet—"is a poor man’s fabulous hotel room on a cliff on a beach without wireless." (True!) The Iyer essay is the most ludicrous, hilarious, parody-defying piece of foolishness ever published; we challenge you to even pick a favorite sentence. (Try this one: "Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours." OR: "I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook." (Haha: SLOWLY, GENTLY, HE ENTERED FACEBOOK. Sorry.) ALSO: "I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot." Remarkable. But the very first sentence is still pretty great though; don't miss it.) So what we see here with Roiphe in comparison to Iyer is that he is the exponentially more successful troll, because he has little idea that he is trolling. Roiphe shows her hand too much, relishing in her trolldom, always crossing little lines of sense, drawing leaping bizarre conclusions, knowing that She Is Controversial. She just exists to stir pots, and so her strange, sometimes seemingly put-on beliefs seem so much thinner than Iyer's, whose work rings with true, if unintentionally hilarious, conviction about the way the world is.

I’m on the internet again. This is how I begin most days, any day, immediately upon waking pulling the machine against my body. I often sleep with the laptop on the bed beside me waiting, as well the last thing I touched before I stopped and tried to begin drifting off. The strobing eye of my MacBook Pro must be covered so as not to wink and wink its light against my face and keep me up. READ MORE

Let's get shirty.

Maybe what I am about to say will come as a surprise to some. But it's something I've known about myself for years. READ MORE

Fraud.¹
Moron.²
Shill.³
Homeboy.⁴
Mac.⁵
Judge.⁶
Mermaid.⁷
Brain in a vat!⁸
Robot.⁹
Chunk of malicious code.¹⁰
Nazi.¹¹
Loser.¹²
Youngster with issues.¹³
Farmer.¹⁴
$20 million start-up carrier.¹⁵
Famous magazine editor!¹⁶
Heeb.¹⁷
Hobbit.¹⁸
Werewolf.¹⁹
Watchdog.²⁰
55-year-old Teamster masquerading as a college coed.²¹
Cecil.²²
God.²³
Human—until you fill out a captcha.²⁴ READ MORE