Media Critique

As a weekly columnist for a 140-year-old newspaper, I'm an endangered species. I'm like a steak, cooking backwards: rarer by the second. More so now that the run of my column is being halved....

Those of a certain generation may recall Herb Caen, the erstwhile?San Francisco Chronicle?columnist who anchored the Macy?s ad next to his daily forays into what he called ?three dot journalism.? I never met Caen...

It used to be the pornographers who pioneered innovative ways to distribute their product, from the banal (like matchbooks and playing cards) to the once-cutting edge province of the Interweb. In the mid-90s, the...

Writers who fear that computers will someday displace them may shudder to learn that the machines won?t just write the books, they will read them too. In recent months, both researchers and literary critics are...

Among the various breeds of online brain-candy, by far one of the most insidious is the so-called Listicle. A portmanteau of ?list? and ?article,? the word sounds like what would result if you tattooed...