Contributors
Jason Pontin
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Editor 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
How Much Do I Love Mesh Networks?
Dear Reader, do I love them at all? Why do I love them? What kinds of new applications and communications will they prompt? Are there some interesting parallels between biological systems and mesh networks? Are mesh networks a cybernetic system?...
In Defense of Deep Throat
The emerging conventional wisdom amongst the commentariat is a stern-toned shock that Deep Throat's motives were unheroic. These, it seems, are the facts: Mark Felt (pictured, looking extremely groovy), the Assistant Director of the FBI in the early 1970s,...
Shout Out for Moi
I'll be on CNN Headline News at 1.15 PM EST today, talking about space exploration. For those that care, this is a weekly gig. I chat about the week's events in technology for about four or five minutes - which,...
Charming your Audience
Some readers will recall my affection for The Hitch. Today, at the Hay Literary Festival in England, as reported by The Guardian: Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all, but I'm sitting here and we're asked...
Lost Love
I am re-reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Reading a book that you once admired, and which was once read by millions, but which is now known to be bad and pretentious is a very odd experience. The Alexandria Quartet...
Transcendence Reconsidered
The most widely read Technology Review story this year was our February cover story, Do You Want to Live Forever?, a profile of the British theoretical biologist and computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey (pictured). Since I began blogging more...
It's a Load of Sith
Actually, Star Wars III: the Revenge of Sith wasn't bad at all. I saw it this afternoon, and I was even moved. After the hand-wringingly awful Jar-jar Binks, and the nearly incomprehensible Attack of the Clowns (it may have been...
What Should I Write About?
In the spirit of the experiment in participatory journalism that Technology Review is conducting at continuous computing , tell me, readers: what should I write my next column about? Bear in mind that I like my column to be loosely...
Purple America
The Daily Browse has a fascinating map depicting congressional support for increased funding of embryonic stem cell research. On Wednesday, Representatives voted 238 to 194 to support federal funding--short of the two-thirds majority required to override Mr. Bush's promised...
