My darling David,

Don’t let these earthly considerations stand in the way of our relationship. Getting to know Tumblr has been the biggest joy of my life. I have never felt so young, so alive, so full of hope for the future as when I am watching your metrics rise exponentially each day.

Oh, I was looking at some of your photos online the other day. Please don’t wear your Google Glass when I introduce you to my board. I want them to approve of you.

All my love, Marissa

—Caitlin Kelly imagines an exchange between Marissa Mayer and David Karp: http://nyr.kr/19XTw6V

It’s too early to say whether Yahoo will screw up Tumblr—by making it ugly, by introducing terrible advertising, by obscuring its wealth of adult content, or by simply casting a pall over it so great that the site’s fickle younger users abandon it. It’s also too early to say whether Yahoo screwed up by buying Tumblr, whose explosive growth has slowed of late, according to Quantcast numbers. Or, more hopefully, maybe Yahoo made its first wildly successful acquisition and the two companies will grow together; Instagram, for example, has in many ways (though not all) been a model acquisition, with the majority of its users having signed up after its purchase by Facebook. The outcome may depend almost entirely on how happy Yahoo makes Karp. (Tumblr’s co-founder, Marco Arment,writes that “Tumblr is David, and David is Tumblr.”) Regardless, Yahoo’s acquisition further concentrates social networking in the hands of a few companies, leaving Twitter and Pinterest behind as the only big, independent social networks of their ilk aside from Facebook.

—Matt Buchanan on Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr: http://nyr.kr/10JTYog

Today, The New Yorker launches Strongbox, an online tool for sources to anonymously send confidential information to our writers and editors. Read more about the platform here: http://nyr.kr/12b4Byx

Matt Buchanan on wearable computers before Google Glass: http://nyr.kr/12Vi7Wb

Above: Steve Mann adjusts his Eyetap. Photograph by Randy Quan.

Recently, I created an app called Petting Zoo. It is an interactive app for iPhones and iPads, and creating it was a difficult but interesting process…

Christoph Niemann illustrates the creation of his new iPhone app, Petting Zoo: http://nyr.kr/Zo7wDY

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the most outrageous criminal law you’ve never heard of. It bans “unauthorized access” of computers, but no one really knows what those words mean. Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department attorney and a leading scholar on computer-crime law, argues persuasively that the law is so open-ended and broad as to be unconstitutionally vague. Over the years, the punishments for breaking the law have grown increasingly severe—it can now put people in prison for decades for actions that cause no real economic or physical harm. It is, in short, a nightmare for a country that calls itself free.

What can be done? Here, Tim Wu considers: http://nyr.kr/WRAXAA

Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned and virtually perfected… But in other news, America’s economic and social decline continues.  Here, George Packer argues that obsessive technological upgrading and the country’s chronic stagnation are intimately related, “in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression. The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world…”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Znc6Rx

In September, 2012, Apple was the most valuable company on earth. Since then, the company’s stock has plummeted thirty-five per cent. What’s wrong with the tech giant? James Surowiecki recently explored this question in the magazine, and in this video he takes a closer look, examining the company’s recent performance and explaining why all the paranoia over Apple might be overstated. 

Since September, Apple stock has fallen 35%. Here, James Surowiecki explains why the company will likely prevail despite its sudden fall from grace: http://nyr.kr/US26BF

On The Business Pages this week, Tim Wu has a story about the open-versus-closed debate in the technology industry. Here’s a look at the metric Wu developed for assessing the “openness” of companies, and see whether Wu’s theory proves true when applied to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft: http://nyr.kr/W7Pv9G