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The internet’s quintessential, paradoxical message is “Only Connect.”

Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.

On April 3, the day The Outline was shut down and its editorial staff let go, my coworkers and I received hundreds of messages in public and private that went a long way toward making me feel better about suddenly losing my job during a pandemic. Weirdly, one of the sentiments that made me feel […]

If a Pulitzer-nominated 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.

One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than […]

Looking for connections in 2018

Everyone listens to Walter Mossberg.

There is a moment in "Shrek" when the despicable Lord Farquaad has the Gingerbread Man tortured by dipping him into milk. This prepares us for another moment when Princess Fiona's singing voice is so piercing it causes jolly little bluebirds to explode; making the best of a bad situation, she fries their eggs. This is not your average family cartoon. "Shrek" is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

In our November cover story, Taylor Swift talks to Chuck Klosterman about whether or not she really hates Katy Perry

In the late 2000s I was sleeping with all of my friends. This didn’t make me special; we were young in one of the several ways people move to cities like New York in order to be young. We were in general not doing much with our lives and so we did what generation after generation of young people have done in order to combat that particular circumstance: We tried to generate enough sex drama amongst ourselves that we didn’t have to notice that we weren’t doing much of anything, that things were harder than they were promised to be, that we had very little money and that everyone else seemed ...

The joy of the free-diver, the peace of the loon, the patience of the turtle, and a touch of the ingenuity and panache of the great sea explorers (a Jacques Cousteau or a Captain Nemo). Tending my depths, plunging into seas uncharted, dipping into mysterious pools and emerging to share the treasures and tales I find there (and perhaps hiding a few treasure maps of my own).

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

It's a one-of-a-kind geological artifact. What's it worth? $100 million—or nothing.