On the life and afterlife of Che Guevara.

On Friday Night Lights as book, film, and TV show.

On how search and advertising became indistinguishable, the finer points of not being evil, and why privacy is by nature immeasurable. How Google made us the product:

“Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics,” wrote Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. “It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising—it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.”

On why routinizing space travel has failed.

A new translation of this one-paragraph short, designed to be read aloud in English.

"The messenger set out at once; a strong, an indefatigable man; thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path though the crowd; every time he meets resistance he points to his breast, which bears the sign of the sun; and he moves forward easily, like no other. "

On Colombia’s “macabre alliance”:

In February 2003, the mayor of a small town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast stood up at a nationally televised meeting with then President Álvaro Uribe and announced his own murder.

A profile of silent film comedian Buster Keaton:

The story of his life seems in its twists and dives borrowed from his movies, survival demanding a pure lack of sentiment.

On the strange ethics of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy:

What matters instead is the division of the world into good and evil, a division that begins with splitting sex into positive and negative experiences, then ripples out from that in fascinating ways.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

On the ground to witness Cuba’s last days:

“Either we rectify our course or the time for teetering along on the brink runs out and we go down. And we will go down…[with] the effort of entire generations.”—Raul Castro

On tragedy, mythology, and the spectacular crash of the Spider-Man musical and its creator, Julie Taymor.

On Sebastian Junger’s War and the documentary Restrepo by Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya yesterday.

On Christian Marclay’s film The Clock.

On Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

On the structural underpinnings of the revolts currently shaking the Arab world.

On photographing the former Norma Jeane Mortenson. “I think she was the best light comedienne we have in films today, and anyone will tell you that the toughest of acting styles is light comedy.”—Billy Wilder

“If genius is hard to define, madness is even more so.” One chess champion’s take on the tortured life of another.

On Mark Twain’s recently released memoir.

February 1st, 2011. Tahrir Square, Cairo.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

On the illusion of the inevitable and the revolutions that ended the Eastern Bloc.

How the relationship between favela-based drug gangs and elite police units tasked with fighting them came to define Rio de Janeiro.

Putin, Medvedev, and how the Russian security agency FSB became the “new nobility.”

“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”