Once again, Inner Space and Outer Space have collided in their paired dance through the frontier of our culture.

The Ukrainian prairie town Zholtye Vody, built in the Soviet era to supply ore for nuclear weapons, now reckons with its deadly legacy. A film by Donald Weber.

Neither all-seeing God nor infinitely cunning Devil, the surveillance video turns us all into suspects who can never prove our innocence or deny our guilt. Larry Frolick reports on the technology that keeps us in limbo — until the next big thing comes along.

FILM | Donald Weber's new film documents the scavengers inside Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone, with a nod to the prophetic vision of Tarkovsky's Stalker.

After a lengthy (foreign) absence, contributor Andrew Gregg returns… I’m not a car guy so when my friends who are car guys started going on about BBC’s program Top Gear, I didn’t pay much attention. And then I was on a British Airways flight and I watched an entire season of Top Gear on the telly. [...]

POLITICS | Random notes on social media in Iran, its "Blogfather", and Tehran's shift from theocracy to dictatorship.

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child] While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic [...]

[Photo: Christopher Frey] Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially [...]

One of the more annoying moments during the first U.S. presidential debate was when the subject of Russia and its recent skirmish with Georgia came up. Both McCain and Obama, without qualification, upbraided big bad Russia as the aggressor, saying NATO and the United States had to be ready to get tough. They allowed no [...]