Written by wired wiki
The mighty search engine has allowed us to do so many things. âMightyâ is the operative word, as these same search engines (usually the one that starts with a “G” and ends with an “oogle”) can also curse us all. If you think about it, any schmuck can find out more about you than youâd like by typing only your first and last name.
Different folks certainly have different tolerance levels for their online persona and how public they want it to be, but thankfully, there are tips to ensure that your boss, your ex, or your mildly interested former friends can keep tabs on you on your terms.
Unfortunately, pleas to remove content on Google fall on deaf, mechanical Google ears. The best and easiest way to remove content from Google (and other search engines in the process) is to remove the content from the internet. This guide will show you how to make the best of the content that is there or how to remove it entirely.
Google Yourself
Do yourself a favor and Google yourself every now and then. Search websites, search images (Google Images and Yahoo Images both allow you to do this), search video; all of it. Carefully comb the rest of the website on which you find yourself linked, too. Trust us, a completely innocuous photo of you at a backyard barbeque can easily end up in the same, shameful, public album as your friends trying to give the cat a contact high at the same event.
Some tips: You’ll want to put your first and last name in quotes. That way, Google will show you the pages where your first and last name are together and filter out lists of pages that just happen to contain both your first and last name somewhere on the page.
Take inventory of your search results. How would this look like to your next employer? Scary?
The Entourage
Many of the scariest websites are most often from people you know. For example, members of wedding parties will often find themselves on a wedding website. Lucky for you, if you’re on a wedding website, you’re probably friends with the person who owns and hosts the content on the internet. A simple e-mail should straighten up any wayward information.
Picasaweb, Flickr and other image searches
Though wedding websites are usually safe, public photo albums are probably not. It’s therefore a good idea to politely request removal of your last name from friends’ public photo albums. Think of how embarrassing it would be to find your full moniker attached to a caption reading âbutt contestant,â no matter how tame or innocent the context.
On Flickr and Picasaweb, if you find yourself tagged in a photo that you really don’t want people to associate to your name, you’ll want to un-tag yourself. Under the picture where you are tagged it says “Remove tag.” Click the link and it won’t show up in the photos section of your profile. It will still be in your friend’s album and other people can still see it, but your name won’t appear when passerby’s mouse over it.
SmugMug is often a professional, password-only site. Perhaps recommend this site to the friends who have sensitive photos of you.
Facebook and LinkedIn
Though you should already have a private Facebook account in the interest of, well, taming your Googlability, hereâs how to hide yourself, anyway.
- Log into your account. Hover your cursor over the Settings tab, and click on Privacy Settings.
- Click Profile to control who can see what on your profile. Just about everything should have âOnly Friends.â Ditto for Contact Information (which is the second tab under Profile).
- Fiddling with the Search is also a good idea. Web searches will tell others looking for your name if you are indeed on Facebook, though you can fix it so people can only see your name, profile pic, and a link to add you as a friend. Or, you can go into mega-stealth mode and make it so just about anyone will never find you. Itâs highly customizable, depending on what you want people to see. And trust us, they are looking.
Ditto with LinkedIn. Anyone googling your name will likely come up on your LinkedIn profile first, and despite it being a repository for your more grown-up pursuits, itâs probably still unsettling to have random Google searchers ask you about things on it if you werenât expecting it.
Adding Robots.txt to your web host
Google and other search engines will be stopped cold in their tracks if they see a dreaded little text file on a web server. The text file is named ‘robots.txt’ and it needs to contain the following text:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
You can create the text file in any plain text editor. If you want to host the embarrassing websites, but don’t want Google (or any other search engine) to see it, add the file to your web host in its top-level folder.
In the Future
As your online and real lives merge even further in the so-called digital age, it’s going to be an uphill battle to remove the content that’s out there. Bad news for those with little common sense.
However, the best way to avoid compromising situations online is to avoid compromising situations in real life. We’re not saying not to have any fun, but until you are able to keep people from taking digital photos of you, you’re stuck behaving properly in public. Look on the bright side, your online self is keeping you honest, right?
Computers: Buddi is a financial management application developed with financial non-experts in mind. Sure, it can import your CSV file from a bank or financial firm, and it does all the standard financial calculations and projections. But the way it switches between money figures, and walks you through the importing and setting up of your accounts, makes it a real open-source find, and you can easily swap profiles between your laptop and desktop systems, if needed. Looking for something with a bit more mathematical oomph? Money management alternative 
Computers, portable, cellphones: You use a multitude of applications and web sites that require passwords, license keys, and administrator codes. On one computer alone, that makes it worth having a central vault for all that stuff. If you use more than one computer, having a consistent KeePass database is really, really helpful. Encrypt your master password database with a file only you have access to, and/or a truly secure single password, and you can take that list just about anywhereâon Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhones, Android, BlackBerry, Palms, on a USB drive, or pretty much anywhere. Open-source coders love to write KeePass apps, so there’s a very good chance you’ll always have this clever password management system at your side. For help getting started with KeePass, check out 
Computers: TrueCrypt is a multi-platform security tool for encrypting and protecting files, folders, or entire drives. The software behind it is open source, and so likely to be supported and developed beyond its current version and platforms. It’s only on Windows, Mac, and Linux at the moment (though that’s no small feat), but it can be 
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Computers, web, mobile: Dropbox creates a single folder that you’ll always be able to access, no matter where you are. That folder can actually 
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Itâs easy to imagine Devil In The White City as a historic true-crime novel, devoted to telling the chilling story of the serial killer H.H. Holmes, with the Chicago Worldâs Fair simply serving as a backdrop. But what makes the book so remarkable is the level of detail provided by Larsonâs research into the setting and the protagonists. Architect Daniel H. Burnham wanted to parlay the fair into a forum that would make Chicago a global city; his quest gets as much page time as the grim details about how Holmes murdered more than 27 young women, and itâs just as compelling. The result is a non-fiction thriller, a tale of creation and destruction filled with bizarre facts and stories that expose the best and worst of human ingenuity.
The trouble with High Fidelity is that itâs a great book about relationships and a miserably anachronistic one about music: Nick Hornbyâs steadfast, monolithic devotion to the super soul hits of the â70s fails to get anything right about the intersection of â90s music and love. Enter Chuck Klostermanâs Fargo Rock City, the most trenchant book ever written about that â80s punchline, âhair metal.â Over the course of his engaging, infinitely quotable discursus, Klosterman unpretentiously maps what music can mean, both within its own imposed narrative, and once it reaches the outside world. He veers all over the place: one moment heâs giving readers a detailed analysis of Guns âN Rosesâ Use Your Illusion video trilogy, and the next, heâs talking about why metal turned him into an alcoholic, and why itâs weird that Pavement never talked about the beer they were drinking. His passion is contagious: You donât have to like (or even be familiar with) the music to be sucked into a world of beautifully argued, casually hilarious passion. In terms of books about what listening to music can mean when you love it to the point of idiocy, few are better.
Thereâs often profit and acclaim in writing books that make abstruse fields of study accessible to the layman: Stephen Hawkingâs A Brief History Of Time, for instance. But thereâs even more glory in writing books that make those fields fun. The bestseller Freakonomics, co-authored by journalist Steven J. Dubner and ârogue economistâ Steven D. Levitt, is an excellent example. By defining economics as âthe study of incentivesâ rather than anything specifically tied to money or commercial interests, Levitt freed himself up for economics-style analysis of everything from dropping crime rates to the outcomes of sumo-wrestling matches. Like any mass-appeal, pop reevaluation of a scientific field, Freakonomics was controversial, with detractors questioning Levittâs premises, processes, and conclusions. But just opening up the field to a wider consideration and discussion was a victory, and Levitt and Dubnerâs lively prose and intriguing conclusions were icing on the cake.
Barbara Ehrenreichâs exploratory journey through the struggling underbelly of American society, undertaken when she realized how many women were being forced into minimum-wage jobs, and decided to try some herself, is emotionally draining but intellectually illuminating. Now, after the great financial collapse of 2008, the work reads more and more like prophecy, as untold millions struggle to scrape up enough change to just make rent, to say nothing of trying to buy food, or care for their kids. Ehrenreichâs travels take her from waitressing to Wal-Mart, and at all turns, she feels desperate and belittled, a feeling many people rudely tossed atop the unemployment line now share. Itâs rare that a social-issues book becomes more prescient as time goes by, but Nickel And Dimed is an urgent exception.
The long 5 oâclock shadow over American politics gets his due in Perlsteinâs exhaustively detailed tome on how the 37th president shaped his country. Richard Nixonâs long-building resentment toward the privileged, plus his conviction that disadvantaged men like himself deserved to be in charge, allowed him to exploit a widening gap between the counterculture and the counter-counterculture, invoking the cues that built a majority to carry him to the White House. Rejecting facile explanations of the aftermath of the 1960s, Perlstein redraws the map of two turbulent decades and picks apart the faux-populism that still inflects political discourse today, drawing those parallels without emphasizing them.
This account of the making of the five movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar of 1967âBonnie And Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Whoâs Coming To Dinner?, and the winner, In The Heat Of The Nightâis one of the great Hollywood books: deeply reported, sharply nuanced, and hugely entertaining even when ping into production minutiae. Harris doesnât caricature subjects even when the temptation must have been overwhelming, such as drunken, racist Dolittle star Rex Harrison, soft-liberal Dinner producer-director Stanley Kramer, and haughty New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, whose one-man crusade against Bonnie And Clyde cost him his job. And the great stories are innumerable, as when The Graduate director Mike Nichols breaks down the skepticism of producer Joseph Levine over Nicholsâ multiple uses of Simon & Garfunkelâs âSounds Of Silenceâ in its first 40 minutes: âI ran it, and he said, âI smell money!ââ says Nichols, âthereby endearing himself to Paul Simon for all time.â
In a decade marked by the memoirs of angry children determined to mine some authorial gold from their unhappy early lives, Du Plessix Grayâs chronicle of growing up as an immigrant in mid-century New York relates history rather than agony, building subtly toward judgment while still acknowledging a debt of gratitude. Francineâs mother and stepfather, Russian Ă©migrĂ©s who fell in love in Paris while they were both married to other people, were artistic geniuses and unrepentant social climbers, too exhausted or indifferent to be proper parents. With her eye to the keyhole, Du Plessix Gray weaves her early recollections into a riveting biography of two strangers she happened to live with, balancing memories of their often-irrational behavior with a sparkling account of their talents as celebrated by the world.
Malcolm Gladwellâs bestseller looked to epidemiology to explain how ideas and phenomena blew up, and ended up becoming its own proof for the theory. Who doesnât know what a tipping point is now? Who could have said that a decade ago, before Gladwell started playing with the idea, then saw others popularize and spread it? While some of Gladwellâs example have been challengedâThe Tipping Pointâs view of declining crime rates contrasts sharply with the one found in Freakonomicsâthe concept seems not only solid, but downright prescient, arriving as it did before talk of Internet memes became a part of casual conversation.
Crowdsourcing would have remained an empty dot-com buzzword if James Surowiecki, the perceptive New Yorker business writer, hadnât put real-life example and surprising science behind it. His persuasive book shows how properly constituted groups outperform inpidual experts, even on tasks where no member of the group seems to contain the relevant expertise. From the very first exampleâa county-fair guess-the-number-of-gumballs-in-the-jar contestâthrough the much-maligned terrorism-predicting âmarketsâ set up by U.S. intelligence in the wake of 9/11, Surowiecki cuts through common-sense solutions to show that our reliance on pundits and geniuses is misplaced. Together, we know more than Alan Greenspan knows separately, which reveals our culture of overpaid technocrats to be thoroughly backasswards. Pair this book with Malcolm Gladwellâs Outliers, and you have a blueprint for a truly enlightened democratic capitalism.
The environmental-writing market boomed in the â00s, as more and more people became convinced that climate change would doom us all within the century. But few environmental books have the terrific gimmick or evocative writing of Weismanâs The World Without Us. Weisman starts from an irresistible premiseâhow long would it take the planet to erase all traces of human society if we all disappeared tomorrow?âbut bolsters it with a tremendous feel for place, sticking readers in the middle of the quiet solitude of the last old-growth forest in Europe, or the controlled chaos of an oil refinery, with equal ease. Weisman managed the rare feat of getting readers to consider their impermanence while also thinking about how it might be a good thing.
By the end of the decade, it had almost become a clichĂ© for authors to wed pulp influences to the sorts of epic family sagas that defined American fiction. But when Michael Chabon tried it with Kavalier & Clay, it felt fresh and new. Though he wasnât the first to dabble in blending these influences, his was the breakthrough novel that made the technique safe for others to try. And even now, after all the imitators, his book still feels alive in a way that few pulp novels or epic family sagas do, as it follows two boys in Great Depression New York City who invent a comic-book superhero. While the bookâs occasional trips off into pulp adventure can seem a little goofy, its wistful, romantic heart and longing for Golden Age archetypes to chart a course for truth and justice remain potent.
On paper, it sounds like the most boring novel ever: yet another examination of repressed Britons on the eve of World War II. Instead, Ian McEwan turned the story of a forbidden love affair and a young girl on the edge of comprehending adult interaction, but not quite there yet, into a moving examination of guilt, forgiveness, and the power of fiction. The novelâs opening passagesâwhere said young girl makes a terrible mistake and accuses her sisterâs lover of a crime he didnât commitâare written with keen psychological insight and leisurely pacing that nonetheless remains tense. But in the bookâs following sections, McEwanâs games with narrative structure and unreliable narrators become something else altogether, an increasingly sad look at how little power stories have over real life.
In December 1996, a group of Peruvian revolutionaries began a hostage crisis in the official residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima that ended violently more than four months later. Ann Patchett was paying attention, and her novel finds a bittersweet lyricism in a fictionalized take on the same event. Stuck together, hostages and hostage-takers find the factors piding themâpolitics, language, and in one of the central relationships, the distance between a famous opera singer and a devoted fanâmatter less than the needs that unite them. The grace they find canât last, however, and like the music that helped inspire the novel, Patchett earns her novelâs heartache by suggesting the possibility of a sweeter, more beautiful world.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood has shown a career-long interest in gender relations and generational changes, particularly how the past gives way to a present that only dimly and incorrectly remembers what came before. That obsession gets worked out in a number of absorbing ways in one of her most ambitious, artful novels to date: The Blind Assassin follows several interlocked threads, as Atwood plays games with identities, connections, parallels, and altered histories. In one thread, she explores the childhood of two sisters, Iris and Laura; in another, Iris is a cantankerous, elderly widow, and Laura is an apparent suicide whose posthumously published novel became an enduring classic. Atwood only gradually reveals what happened between these bookends, and she keeps readers guessing, as it becomes clear that what the world remembers about Laura has very little bearing on what actually happened. Like many Atwood novels, Assassin is a puzzle box, but luminous writing, well-drawn characters, and the keenly melancholy theme of generational amnesia have more to do with the novelâs success than the series of reveals Atwood puts her readers through.
Itâs lonely on the corner between Hispanic slang and geek culture, but this 2008 Pulitzer-winnerâs âlovesick nerdâ Oscar de Leon can only dream about hanging out somewhere else. The frenetic multi-generational saga of family curses and the legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is a heroâs tale and a fantasy homage rising out of a thicket of bilingual wordplay and a glorious stew of cultural references. Oscarâs determination to overcome his fate, set into motion when his grandfather runs afoul of Trujilloâs wishes, captivates even the jaded sometime narrator Yunior, faithful to his memory even though he was unable to be to his sister.
Popcorn fiction and historical fiction were both sneered at more often than not in the â00s, as poorly written tales of the secret history of everything overwhelmed the bestseller charts. Enter Goldâs debut novel, a romp through early 20th-century San Francisco and the world of vaudevillian magic that makes few claims to historical veracity, and rockets along like the best page-turners. But Goldâs novel is about more than how a sad magician finds love and constructs the ultimate illusion while avoiding assassins and those who suspect him of killing the president. Itâs also about moving on past crippling loss, overcoming depression, and learning how to feel again. Goldâs pacing makes Carter easy to read, but his sense of emotion makes it take up space in the heart.
The Tolstoy-esque family novel got its 21st-century upgrade early, and has withstood all comers since. The Lambertsâ disintegration under the pressures of work, illness, and love unfolds with a cynical humor that strips the familyâs pretensions away until only their most craven selves survive as they struggle to break free. As these unsympathetic characters go through the wringer, Jonathan Franzen outlines the symptoms of modern malaise, whose only cure is being able to see through the layers of protective self-delusion. The modern dysfunctional family wriggles under Franzenâs microscope, but its features are all too familiar. Oprah, take note: His next book, Freedom, is due to arrive next fall, just in time to inform the next decade.
Written from the perspective of an autistic boy obsessed with detective work, Mark Haddonâs astounding tightrope act portrays his protagonistâs richly odd inner life and places it in the context of a suspenseful journey outside his comfort zone of numbers, routines, and maps. Plunged into an unfamiliar world of train travel and self-reliance, Christopher tries to find out who killed his neighborâs dog, emulating his hero Sherlock Holmes, and trying not to be fooled by fake phantasms like Holmesâ creator. Not merely the finest fictional depiction of the autistic brain yet produced, Curious Incident is also among the best page-turning thrillers of the decade.
Much of America made it out of the 20th century badly equipped to deal with the 21st. Richard Russoâs Empire Falls is set in just such a place, a rust-belt Maine town thatâs kept going even though the industry that led to its creation can no longer sustain it. Russo brought his by-then-familiar command of memorable characters and comic moments to a novel more ambitious than any heâd attempted before. The book captures a time and place unnerved by a future that offers no reassuring promises of a better tomorrow beyond the comfort its inhabitants can give each other.
Maybe Jonathan Lethem didnât set out to create a magnum opus with Fortress Of Solitude, but thatâs what he ended up with. The novel ties together a lifetime of obsessionsâwith music, art, fathers and sons, comics, and moreâand grounds them in the 1970s Brooklyn of Lethemâs childhood. Itâs a place of sadness, peril, and racial unease, but itâs also overflowing with the imaginative possibilities of childhood, at least until crises and looming adulthood start to shut them down. Itâs a novel immersed in the past, but deeply distrustful of nostalgia and fully aware that the pain of youth has a habit of lingering, and even the presence of magic does little to secure happiness.
Twenty-three years after the luminous Housekeeping, Robinson proved herself one of the greatest American writers of her generation, winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for literature for her equally heartbreaking Gilead. Few could have predicted that the same pen that channeled orphans Ruth and Lucille coming of age in rural Idaho could so masterfully evoke an aging Congregationalist minister, looking back over his life with wonder for the grace given him but regret for his namesake, the son of a good friend who never took the path his elders would have chosen for him. Replete with references to Calvin, Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, and other thinkers with whom Reverend Ames takes respectful issue, Robinsonâs novel serves as a gentle theological treatise, but it never loses the glow of human relationships.
Arguments for and against its place in the Great Western Canon aside, the Harry Potter series was undeniably the biggest literary phenomenon of the â00s. Though the first installments from the â90s were inarguably childrenâs books, beginning with 2000âs Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, the series began to morph into something decidedly more complex, reaching its apex in 2005 with Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. The penultimate entry in the seven-part series is most notable for the shocking death at its climax, probably the seriesâ most unexpected, harrowing moment. But even more remarkable is the fact that it spends 650-plus pages basically filling in backstory and moving pieces into place for the seriesâ conclusion without sacrificing momentum or character development. (Though it perhaps attempts to cover too much ground at times, giving some elements short shrift.) In spite of whatever other limitations she has as a writer, J.K. Rowling is at her best in Half-Blood Prince, capably unspooling her epic yarn in the straightforward yet enthralling manner that accounts for the seriesâ unprecedented success.
It’s the kind of literary mash-up thatâs simultaneously strikingly original and comfortingly familiar: Take a sort of idealized version of the Victorian-era novel, with all its drawing-room manners and morally repressed emotions, and insert some magic. And not the symbolic kind, eitherâactual magic, with rules, mysteries, and all kinds of difficult-to-fathom but impossible-to-ignore dangers. Susanna Clarkeâs first novel is the warmly readable study of a frequently chilly world, a story to get lost in about the seduction of being lost, and an exhaustively researched tome on a subject whose research is entirely fictional. Ten years in the writing, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell still feels as light as a feather, and its tale of the friendship and rivalry of the two greatest magicians of their age has the ageless quality of all truly great fantastical fiction, reassuring without being entirely trustworthy, and utterly intoxicating.
Jeffrey Eugenidesâ long-in-the-making follow-up to The Virgin Suicides adds layer after layer around a kicky, potentially sensationalistic premise. Cal is born Calliope to a family of Greek descent, and spends years living as a girl, unaware of the intersexed condition that makes him genetically male. Jeffrey Eugenides follows the path of the gene that leads to that surprising revelation, tracing it back to Old World conflicts between Greece and Turkey while considering its place in the novelâs sharply realized 20th-century New World of 1970s Michigan. The past doesnât die, it just mutates, and maybe, hopefully improves, on its way from one generation to the next.
Mainstream authors of literary fiction self-consciously slumming it in genres of ill repute ended up being one of the surprising movements of the â00s. While most of these novels and stories were too aware of their genre roots, Kazuo Ishiguroâs tale of two girls who slowly realize the true nature of their existence keeps whatâs best about his writingâhis sense of the world as an ephemeral place that could pop out of being at any momentâand weds it to the best dystopic science fictionâs sense of raw humanity breaking through in a sterile world. Like the similar literary science-fiction experiment The Road, Never Let Me Go ends up becoming a testament to the many ways love finds to stay alive.
A father and son travel through a post-apocalyptic America, half-starved, choking on a never-ending stream of ash sifting down from the sky, and with no hope for an end to their suffering beyond dissolution and death. Much has been made of the bleakness of Cormac McCarthyâs 2006 novel, but given its subject matter, the bleakness isnât all that surprising. What is surprising is the way McCarthy manages to find a modicum of purpose in all that despair, creating a world in which all normal reasons for livingâaccomplishment, social structure, the possibilities of the futureâhave been ruthlessly stripped away, then showing how existence still struggles onward, in spite of all barriers against it. Itâd be a stretch to call The Road uplifting, and the book has more than its share of horrors, but what makes it such a powerful, wrenching experience isnât the aftermath of societyâs collapse, but the suggestion that, even removed from sentimentality, the basic forward momentum of a dependent and his protector remains. Things donât have to be good to continue, but they will continue, and sometimes thatâs all thatâs left.
Wroblewskiâs first novel retells the story of Hamlet on a farm in northern Wisconsin, and with some of the characters replaced by dogs bred by the Sawtelle family for extraordinary intelligence. And not a word of this lengthy, immersive journey into the struggle of young Edgar to break through the dangerous relationship between his uncle and his mother feels like a gimmick. Full of detail about the training methods that make the Sawtelle dogs special, and anchored by a fugitive quest for justice with only adolescent and canine wits to sustain them, Edgarâs story has the mesmerizing quality of great literature. Itâs a world that feels found by accident, unknown to outsiders, and so beautifully tragic that readers will beg the pages to turn more slowly.
In 1845, Captain John Franklin led two ships on a hunt through the Arctic for the fabled Northwest Passage. Both ships became icebound in the Victoria Strait, and all 128 men were lost. Itâs hard to imagine a more horrible way to die, starving slowly as the temperatures plunge and scurvy drives shipmates to contemplate murder and cannibalism, but Dan Simmons decided to make things worse in his 2007 novel, throwing a monster out on the ice and letting the blood flow freely. Telling the story through the perspectives of various real-life crew members, Simmons creates a tense, unrelenting narrative about survival pushed to its extremity, where an inexplicable dark god lurking at the edges isnât nearly as upsetting as the dwindling food supplies and an actively hostile environment. As grippingly detailed as a true-life adventure narrative, with all the symbolism and tragedy that fiction can provide, The Terror is a rewarding, haunting read. Just make sure to check the thermostat before opening the cover, whatever the season.
The decade was kind to debut novels of powerful imagination, and none were better poised to seize the American reading public than Audrey Niffeneggerâs artfully constructed romance. Only in novelistic form could the emotions of her time-crossed lovers be fully appreciated. As readers proceed linearly through the book, Claire travels from birth to death in the normal way, while her husband Henry is yanked unpredictably through time. Told from their alternating perspectives, the story builds on the yearning and regret that comes from knowing the end before the beginning, and from being given glimpses of the future that others cannot know until it arrives. The Time Travelerâs Wife earns the tears it so copiously extracts, and creates an epic love affair perfect for the turn of the millennium.
From one of the most original talents this decade produced, White Teeth follows an unconventional friendship that becomes a portal into a world where every characterâs story sounds truer than the last. The chance meeting of Archibald Jones and Samed Iqbal, fellow World War II veterans who reunite in 1970s London, are just the first brushstrokes in a richly detailed portrait of a neighborhood changing faster than its inhabitants can understand as they struggle to find meaning in a world radically altered from their forefathersâ. In spite of its Dickensian spread, Zadie Smithâs debut novel never feels overstuffed or self-consciously stylish. Instead, its assured tone guides readers through genetic controversy, radical Muslim groups, and past-as-prologue, toward a profound commentary on assimilation and culture in the lives of her perse subjects.
Aviary Screen Capture
One of the most popular Firefox extensions, and beloved by many RSS consumers is Feedly.
It has always puzzled me why Google does not integrate their own superior RSS reader, Google Reader, into Chrome. Until that day comes though, Chrome Reader will have to suffice.
Dotspots is an annotation service that we recently wrote about 
