Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcom Gladwell (The New Yorker)
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.
7 Billion by Robert Kunzig (National Georgraphic)
Historians now estimate that in [Antoni van] Leeuwenhoek’s day [1677] there were only half a billion or so humans on Earth. After rising very slowly for millennia, the number was just starting to take off. A century and a half later, when another scientist reported the discovery of human egg cells, the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion. A century after that, around 1930, it had doubled again to two billion. The acceleration since then has been astounding. Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us.
Worst Gear of the Year: 2010 (Wired)
But a lot of the gadgets we reviewed this year just plain sucked. Some were atrocious train wrecks, hurriedly pushed out by companies looking to bring a product to market before it was ready. Others were just ill-conceived pieces of garbage that, for whatever reason, slipped past the quality-control department and made it onto store shelves.