"If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it."

"The factual statements Brooks uses in his argument are wrong. Not arguable, or questionable, or suspicious. Wrong. And since everything else flows from those wrong facts, the rest of the column can't be taken seriously."

It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.

Reader-to-author e-missives come in a few, quite specific, categories.

"Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations."

Edgar Allan Poe would love Alexander Graham Bell's workshop here. Pendulums, buzzers, and ticking sounds everywhere, with a mysterious note to the chambermaid in crabbed script. In a droll nod to shifting technologies, there's an 18th-century ear trumpet on the settee, where Mr. Bell evidently left it while in a fog of inventive absentmindedness.

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever.

What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it.

Al Jaffee's fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.

With just $500 for a weekend

Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he was moving to India to work as a software engineer for six months, “she said, ‘Maybe I’ll get to talk to you when I have a problem with my credit card.’ ”

The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.