I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane
I will be in Shanghai for the next four days and posts may be intermittent. I shall try to jot down a few impressions - but the final report will have to wait until my return....
Contributors
Jason Pontin
Follow @twitterapiEditor in Chief and Publisher
I'm the editor in chief and the publisher of MIT Technology Review. That means I direct the editorial, platform development, and general business strategy of the company's digital and print publications, as well as our events.
Before joining MIT Technology Review in 2004, I was the editor in chief of a now-vanished biotechnology magazine I founded. Between 1996 and 2002, I was the editor of Red Herring magazine, which the Wall Street Journal called the "bible of the dot.com boom." I grew up on a farm in Northern California, where my mother raised game birds for the restaurants of San Francisco, but I was educated in England, at Harrow School and Oxford University. Consequently, my accent wanders alarmingly.
Jason Pontin's Stories
Where Are They?
A pleasantly lulling subject for speculation (at least for those of us who grew up reading science fiction) is the following: if the universe is very big and very old, and multicellular life is not vanishingly unlikely, then where are...
Heads Up, Pontin Fans
There are some, right? Come on, a few? No? In any case, I shall be doing my weekly gig on CNN's Headline News at 1.15 PM, EST. My subject? NitroMed's new drug BiDil, which shows remarkable efficacy in treating congestive...
Another Day, Another Knight
I read in John Haffenden's just-published biography of the poet-critic Sir William Empson (Volume I: Among the Mandarins) that the old codger's favorite tipple was a brimming pint glass of gin and Guiness - which really does sound perfectly...
Dinner with Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Dinner last night with the organizers of Finland's Millennium Prize, whose mission is to recognize "a technological innovation that brings significant improvement to the quality of life." Present were Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and...
Going to China. Need Guanxi!
On June 17th, I am going to Shanghai for a few days. I have been to China twice before, and to Hong Kong thrice - but not since 2000. There are three purposes to my trip. I want to find...
Milton Friedman Interviewed
I missed this interview in the San Francisco Chronicle last week. I am no fan of the 92-year-old Friedman, and consider his influence on the Anglo-Saxon economies entirely lamentable, but it is hard to deny that he is the...
Technology and Fun
Within the walls of Technology Review, the editors call the August issue (in the hands of our print subscribers in the first week of July), the "Summer o' Fun" issue. Most months, we limit ourselves to analyzing emerging technologies and...
Bored by Apple's Deal with Intel
Today, during my weekly appearance on CNN, I was asked about Steve Jobs's announcement at the World Wide Developers Conference that henceforth Apple's computers would use Intel's chips (and not the PowerPC chip manufactured by IBM and Motorola that powered...
Geoblogging
A very thought-provoking entry by Senior Editor Wade Roush on his Continuousblog about what he calls "geoaware computing" - by which he means the confluence of a variety of geography-related social computing technologies, including moblogging, photoblogging, geocaching, geotagging (also called...
