“Standing at the shore of this overwhelming sea, instead of trying to swallow it all in, the new masters of information skim across it, picking out things from all over, and diving in deep only when necessary. Maybe more importantly, the true masters aren’t the ones who simply accumulate knowledge; they’re those that reconfigure it into something new”.

From The Masters of Data, another good article at the Toronto Standard on life in the digital age.

“[He] allegedly hacked three people to death in a revenge attack after his daughter was reportedly gang-raped and infected with HIV.”

Is he an avenging father who will now outlive his child? Or is he just another sociopath?

A few months ago I had lunch with an editor who’s been in this business for nearly 30 years. Our conversation found its way to a topic that always tends to crop up when journalists of different generations hang out together: What does it mean to be an editor and writer when journalism has become associated with aggregating instead of editing, optimizing instead of writing, clicking instead of reading?

“One of my regulars died today. It wasn’t the first phone call I ever received that said as much, but I received a follow-up text that alluded to the fact that he might have taken his own life (that text came an hour later).

“Like any weekday I was at my big boy job, a place far beyond my situation over a decade ago when I began slinging the booze. But this news —horrible fucking news under any context— seemed different.”

He Was A Friend of Mine… by James Thornburg

“March 5 at dawn, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.”

More photos at My Modern Met.

“Yet with all these reasons why the media should have failed, in fact they succeeded. A major event in world history was covered more quickly, with more nuance, involving a greater range of voices and critical perspectives, than would have been conceivable even a few years ago. Within hours of the first protests in Egypt, American and world audiences read dispatches from professional correspondents—on Web sites, rather than waiting until the next day, as they had to during the fall of the Berlin Wall. They saw TV news footage—including Al Jazeera’s, which was carried by few U.S. broadcasters but was available on computers or mobile apps. Then the Twitter feeds from and about Egypt, the amateur YouTube videos from the streets, the commentary of contending analysts—all of it available as the story took place. We take this for granted, yet there has been nothing like it before. Even a year ago it would have been hard to imagine how thoroughly, and with what combination of media, voices, and judgments, an event in an Arab capital could have been witnessed around the world.”

(via @brian_frank)

‘No. No. All Pakistanis are bastards. Thieves all of them.’ He was suddenly very angry. ‘I do not have a single friend from Pakistan.’

All colour drained from Asghar’s cheeks and he turned to look out of the window. After a few moments’ silence, the boy spoke again. ‘You are from Iran?’

‘No. I am from Pakistan,’ Asghar said in a cold voice.

A story from the New Voices section of Granta magazine by Ali Akbar Natiq.

“For the watching world, Gaddafi’s cruel retaliation defies belief, but for Libyans, the danger inherent in speaking out is nothing new. It has become an inescapable part of their life.”

This video on Al Jazeera’s website shows Libyan dissidents spread across the western world supporting their countrymen in protests against Gaddafi’s regime, calling for Libya’s freedom and an end to the violence once and for all.

“Is there then, some way for the resistance of the oppressed to become effective, and for what’s intolerable to be definitively removed? Is there some way for the mass of singularities and atoms that we all are to come forward as a constitutive power, or must we rather accept the juridical paradox that con­stitutive power can be defined only by constituted power?”

This and many other ideas discussed in translation by Tony Negri and Gilles Deleuze.

‘Robert Kennedy smelled the water from the pool in his hair and the fresh sardines. “Son of a bitch. The whole world’s a son of a bitch,” he said. He sprinted towards the pool and cannonballed in. Sandy barked wildly.’

Bobby Kennedy and his Sea Lion Sandy at QuickFiction.org. Five more excellent Quick Fiction stories can be found here.