Cartoon by Roz Chast. For more from this issue: http://nyr.kr/14ZQ9hY

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by Ken Krimstein. For more: http://nyr.kr/14tO0dP

In her article about transgender teens in the magazine this week, Margaret Talbot quotes Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s son Stephen calling himself, among other things, a “nerd fighter.” It might escape the average reader’s notice that this term is more than the sum of its parts. In the teen-age population, “nerdfighter” (as a compound word) has a very specific meaning and etymology. Primarily, it identifies the teen-ager in question as a follower of John Green…

Michelle Dean on John Green and the nerdfighters: http://nyr.kr/XJiBAo

Nilkanth Patel on dunking—and being dunked on—in the age of YouTube, Twitter, and 24-hour sports networks: http://nyr.kr/YUmPUz

Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side. 

In this week’s issue, Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the various events that led to Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide earlier this year, through interviews with those closest to Swartz, including his parents and girlfriend at the time. Since his death, “his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes,” MacFarquhar writes. “They have done this because it is what he would have wanted.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YEO7ei

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan. For more: http://nyr.kr/XUeyQb

Sasha Frere-Jones weighs in on Baauer and the “Harlem Shake” phenomenon sweeping the web: It “is not a dance craze but, rather, an Internet-language craze, a replication based on imitating the syntax of a particular video. With other dance crazes, you could use whatever music you liked and twerk or do the dougie, but you did have to get those dances roughly right to be part of the phenomenon.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VVaRwp

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever have to the ring of Gyges—the invisibility charm that allows its wearer to be alone while having access to the outside world—which Plato posited as the truest test of how a person will act when freed from accountability or restraint. We might not be doing anything evil, but we’re not doing anything we want the world to see…

Andrea DenHoed reflects on a friend’s fake Facebook wedding, and the gap we straddle between performance and secrecy: http://nyr.kr/WxvdX8

(Source: newyorker.com)

Ben Greenman on the artist’s new website: http://nyr.kr/XxSHKM

With an artist as mercurial (and as historically Internet-hostile) as Prince, this is a significant development, though it’s worth asking if the new material is any good. The answer is a qualified yes…

I control the html and the http and, as it happens, I control your computer or handheld device. Completely. Ctrl-Alt-Del that, sucka!

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/ZQCOWp