INFATUATION AND MY FIRST SALON Everyone experiences an infatuation, whether with a glamorous, Photoshopped celebrity, or the high school homecoming queen or king. Infatuation is a form of fantasy, but sometimes the dream can become a reality, which happened when I was nineteen, a senior at Reed College in Portland…

MY FIRST CLIENT AT AGE 13 I’m a Silicon Valley publicist who has worked with inventors, technology pioneers, public interest advocates, and charlatans, several of whom I’ve dropped and denounced publicly as well. My first experience as a publicist, I realized, was with Larry Karr, an inventor whom I met…

EPIGENETIC TRAUMA ON MEMORIAL DAY When she was 47, my grandmother, Symcha Goldberg, was murdered by Nazis either on the cattle cars transporting Jews from the Lodz ghetto to Treblinka, Poland, or in the gas chambers inside the extermination camp itself. …

LARRY PAGE AND SERGEY BRIN DID IT. WHY COULDN’T JEFF ZUCKER? Everyone knows that Marissa Mayer got her start at Google while having an affair with cofounder Larry Page. …

ELIZABETH HOLMES TRIES TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS: SMART COOKIE AND DUMB BLONDE It seems as if Theranos protagonist Elizabeth Holmes has been attempting to avoid a long jail sentence — and will probably only get a short probation — by claiming in her fraud trial she was being manipulated…

FACEBOOK IS METASTATIZING Like Cancer, the Social Media Site Is Invading the Universe What else is there to say? I’ve been reading a brilliant satire of a high-tech company like Facebook titled The Startup Wife by Tahmina Anam, a fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature who originally hails from Bangladesh. In the book, a fictional company, called WAI, for We Are Infinite, creates like-minded communities through algorithms based on people’s beliefs.

STEVE JOBS WOULD HAVE HATED THE APPLE DEPRESSION APP Steve Jobs was an angry guy. He was angry at having been given away by his biological parents for adoption, and he often took out his anger on people around him but also by channeling his energy in productive ways, by…

RICHARD STALLMAN DESERVES AN ENDOWED CHAIR IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY It’s been more than two years since MacArthur Fellow and founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman was forced to resign from his positions at MIT and the FSF. In March of 2021, he was reinstated to the…

Emojis: the 21st Century’s Return to Hieroglyphics I spent my first school year in an ancient, four-room building in western Massachusetts learning how to write longhand with an old-fashioned ink pen whose nib required a baptismal dip into the inkwell in the furrowed wood desktop every few letters. …