Here's how the story got started. Back in October, the FBI announced that it had broken up an international crime ring when it arrested six Estonians in what was then heralded as “the biggest cyber criminal takedown in history.” The Estonians had, over the course of four years, hijacked more than 4 million computers in 100 countries through the use of malware known as DNSChanger. By redirecting the infected browsers of unwitting users, DNSChanger was able to send high volumes of traffic to the criminal ring’s rogue websites and servers, collecting more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue and exposing their victims to information theft in the process.

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But something shifted a few years ago. She became afraid of talking on the phone. Just hearing it ring could provoke panic. Maybe it was the suffocation of carrying her cellphone all day long. (“There are these tentacles in you all the time,” she said.) But she rarely answered the phone, preferring to text message, and the voice mail piled up like unopened bills dumped in a desk drawer – frightening and unknown and ever present -- until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and in a rush of guilt she would delete dozens of messages that had been left for her without even listening to them.

Sometimes she would text the person to find out what they needed: “Sorry I missed your call,” she would type, although technically she wasn’t, and technically she hadn’t. Instead, like so many people I know, she had simply stopped using her phone for the one purpose Edison intended: to speak to another person.

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Last week’s big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely “enable us to give you the services you want - so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can.”

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Canahuati was born in Texas on Nov. 11. This past Good Friday, she was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a group of rare neuromuscular diseases that, in her case, were terminal. "We asked our doctors specifically if there is anything. Is there trial drugs, anything out of the country?" her mother, Linda, told CNN this week. So after "sitting around for two days crying and being devastated, since there is no cure and there is nothing we can do," her father, Mike, decided to make the most of what was left of his daughter's cruelly brief expected lifespan. Writing in Avery's voice, he created a blog -- and set a few goals.

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Even a cursory glance at Pinterest makes it easy to see why so many of its critics have been dismissive about it – specifically about its girlishness. In Salon earlier this year, Jude Stewart called the site "basically online scrapbooking." Slate's Farhad Manjoo summed it up in a feature called "Cupcakes, Boots, and Shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal," wherein he admitted, "I just don't get it." And when I first looked at Pinterest, my initial impression was "social networking for cat ladies."

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Upon first brush, there’s not too much to grasp on to with Draw Something. The title of the game is essentially its elevator pitch: You are presented with three words, then you pick one, and then have a blank canvas on your smartphone/tablet/whatever to, well, draw something. You use your finger to draw some stuff on the screen, which ten times out of nine comes out as some sub-MS Paint-worthy scribble. The person you’re playing with then guesses what you just drew. Then, they draw something. You watch this happen, all in real time. And on a certain level, that’s it. Pictionary for the digital age. But why do we play Draw Something so obsessively, like an alcoholic returning to the bar for just one more round, and then another? Perhaps there is something downright pedestrian about Draw Something. Then again, that might be the point.

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But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect -- from Google, YouTube and Facebook -- the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of “an acoustic world,” one with “no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,” a new “information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.” He published "Understanding Media" in 1964, proceeding from the premise that “we become what we behold,” that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

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Granted, Ms. Love has never been the traditional SUV-driving, cookie-baking kind of mom who posts incredibly detailed stuff about her baby's poops.  But her recent slew of attention-getting Twitter insanity -- and her 19-year-old daughter Frances Bean's mortified response – suggests we are entering a new era of fail, one in which a parent's awkward behavior isn't of the adorable "What's this button do?" variety. Instead, it may be more like "S#&% My Dad Said At Burning Man."

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HuffPo Parents editor Lisa Belkin had written an essay shortly after the Salon piece ran, in which she questioned the ethics of bloggers who expose their kids’ private lives for big blog traffic and book deals, citing Coburn and fat-shaming mom Dara Lynn-Weiss as prime examples of blurry-boundaried mommy bloggers.

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I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me -- a smiling, chubby baby -- on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

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The critique may well hold true for large deregulatory swathes of the new law -- it didn't generate massive Republican support for nothing, after all. But there's one piece that's getting unfairly castigated and it just happens to be something that could have enormous progressive potential. It's the piece called "crowdfunding": the Internet-enabled aggregation of lots of small sums of cash as way to raise capital for individuals or enterprises who would otherwise face an uphill battle getting the attention of banks or well-heeled investors.

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“I just use Facebook to meet up with friends or to know what’s happening next week,” he said. “My parents and older people abuse Facebook. They put too much out there.” Like a lot of young adults, Marty doesn't have much use for email, though he uses it with his cousins “as a way to tell longer, more involved stories, mostly about how out of it our parents are.”

I'm considered part of Marty's generation, despite our 10-year age difference. But the only common ground we had in that conversation was the Phillies and smoking a cigarette in the parking lot of a bar. When it comes to technology, I might as well be his granddad.

Born in 1978, I’m a millennial in name only. I’m really a Luddite. I don’t get technology, and for a long time I tried to convince myself I didn’t want to get it. My view on the latest cyber advances was lack of interest and occasionally hostility. I imagined that this rejection marked me as an iconoclast or a rugged individualist. A real man listens to Led Zeppelin and doesn’t listen to Led Zeppelin on iTunes -- that sort of thing. Now, thanks to that mulishness and vanity, I feel like a clamshell of a man, outdated and struggling to communicate with the rest of my cohorts’ fancy smartphones. At the age of 33, I've been left behind.

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“But in the long watches of the night, in the solitude of my tent, I conceived a plan of government which, by the grace of God, I hope to be able to give to the American people. ... (H)ateful as is the thought of assuming supreme power, I can see no other way clearly." -- from "Philip Dru: Administrator"

"Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935" is a novel about a successful rebellion against a hopelessly corrupt U.S. government. Its leader then becomes a benevolent dictator, and restores the rule of law to the Republic. Though he didn’t put his name on the book, author Colonel Edward Mandell House was a Texas political insider who worked assiduously to make Woodrow Wilson president. After the 1912 election, he became Wilson’s closest advisor.

So is it a bad turn-of-the-century novel -- or a Nostradamus-like prediction of America under President Obama?

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But it's cool. It was worth it.

Let me back up a bit. The email that I sent to those applicants included a list of 42 job application dos-and-don'ts that I wrote after seeing so many different people make the same mistakes. It was frustrating to see people unknowingly sabotage their chances of finding work by making easily avoidable errors. So I wrote my email and sent it to all of the applicants. My list contains mostly common sense things like “check your spelling” and “don't talk badly about your current or past employer.” (You can read the entire thing here.)

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Whatever happened to Ron Paul?

He, uh... well, this happened to him: He is running for president still but he hasn't won any primaries. He has 50 delegates. The end.

But how did that happen? How did Ron Paul not win all the primaries and the delegates, after he raised a bunch of money and had big rallies?

His strategists are searching for answers, and one may be that many who turned up for his rallies were less eager to take part in Republican primaries or argue Mr. Paul’s case at Republican caucuses.

Even Mr. Paul cannot entirely explain why the passion he generated, especially among young people and those his campaign identified as motivated supporters, did not translate into more votes.

“I don’t have a full answer for that,” says Mr. Paul, who says he believes ballot irregularities have chipped into his numbers in some places. He adds, “I think there’s some problem with always making sure this energy is translated into getting to the polls.”

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“I’m not sure how I feel about you anymore,” he wrote.

How could this be? A week earlier, he professed his love. He wanted to change his Facebook status to “in a relationship.” How did it go so wrong so fast?

More curiously, why was I feeling devastated by my 14-year-old daughter’s first breakup when she seemed unscathed by it? Katie replied to her new ex that these things happen and there were no hard feelings. I couldn’t move on so quickly.

“He’s not sure how he feels about you?!” I shouted. “You are smart, beautiful and kind. For God’s sake, you play piano for old folks at nursing homes and knit hats to support children in Africa! You’re borderline perfect. What’s he not sure of?”

Katie told me to take a deep breath. It would all be fine, she assured me. She explained that John was a nice guy whom she enjoyed getting to know, but ultimately they had very different interests. They lived on different coasts. It could never work.

“But … he was so cute,” I said, pouting.

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“Inevitable,” several prominent journalists tweeted when the site appeared, already steeped in Etch A Sketch riffs for several hours. And while it does feel like these gags arise organically out of the social media ecosystem, they’re not exactly inevitable. Somebody has to make them.

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Martin's story has sparked grief, anger and expected outbursts of racist online commentary since his death on Feb. 26. That's when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer and overeager 911 caller, gunned down a young man with no criminal record after telling police he looked "suspicious" and "on drugs." Zimmerman has claimed he was acting in self-defense, a tough assertion to make stick when you kill a young man who was carrying a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman has not been arrested.

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"Isn't it strange that his profile doesn't say that he played professional soccer in Germany?" I asked my friend Mary the following day. I was sitting in her kitchen chair, where I often park myself as the two of us try to untangle some romantic mystery.

"He told you he played soccer in Germany?" She stifled a laugh. "And you believed him?"

I believed him. Over the next two weeks, as the bizarre story of Todd unfolded, this was the humbling phrase I would be forced to repeat. Yes, I believed him. I believed that he was a wealthy entrepreneur who had started his first company at the age of 20. I believed that he got a soccer scholarship to a liberal arts college in upstate New York and later traveled all over Europe. I believed that he had a daughter, and that she had sparkling blue eyes, and that she liked cats and pirates. I believed these things because -- well, because he told them to me. (Todd is not his real name, by the way.)

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