In the spring of 2000, still three years shy of Chris Moneymaker’s World Series win and the subsequent commencement of the poker boom, Harper’s assigned novelist James McManus to Las Vegas to report on the increasing presence of women in that traditionally macho competition.

There seems to be a common, if unexamined, perception among Internet users that their virtual activity can be divided into two camps. In the first resides e-mail and other types of electronic correspondence—legitimate forms of communication all and enablers of human productivity, progress, and sociability

I know I’m supposed to be cynical about Barack Obama. The political process is broken, the cynics say, crushed by three decades of Republican rule, undermined by a stupefied—or stupid-fried—electorate, and sabotaged by a media industrial complex the likes of which Dwight Eisenhower could never have imagined.

“You all here for the ” says a black man in a pinstriped suit and Oxford shoes, one of three dressed in nearly-identical fashion.