Patrick Kingsley:

Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection.

“We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,” Viik said. “So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn’t afford them at home.”

The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.

Central to the Estonian project is the ID card, introduced in 2002. Nine in 10 Estonians have one, and – by slotting it into their computer – citizens can use their card to vote online, transfer money and access all the information the state has on them.

William MacNamara:

In a cave on a mountaintop in northern Ethiopia I meet a Christian monk reputed to be 140 years old. Even if this were true, he is markedly young compared to the relics hidden around him in these holy mountains. A few steps away from his hermit hole is a wooden door set flush against the rockface. It is the entrance to St Mary Korkor, one of more than 100 churches buried in the mesas of Tigray, in Ethiopia’s far north.


Push open the church door and you enter the mountain. In the gloom of the nave are frescoes depicting scenes straight out of a Renaissance chapel: the Annunciation, the Last Supper, St George slaying the dragon. But the faces of Jesus and the saints are African, and they were painted 1,200 years ago. This region is a Christian heartland, familiar and yet fascinatingly different. Easter, for example, is celebrated with church services, then family get-togethers and meals – but not this weekend. Instead, it comes after a Lent fasting period of 56 days, on April 15 this year.

Science Daily:

Geneticist Michael Snyder, PhD, has almost no privacy. For more than two years, he and his lab members at the Stanford University School of Medicine pored over his body’s most intimate secrets: the sequence of his DNA, the RNA and proteins produced by his cells, the metabolites and signaling molecules wafting through his blood. They spied on his immune system as it battled viral infections.

Harry McCracken:

In 2008, Polaroid discontinued a product which seemed to be pretty much obsolete in the digital age: instant film. Except that it wasn’t obsolete at all. A lot of people still liked taking Polaroid photos, and found things in the medium which digital couldn’t match.



One of them was Dr. Florian Kaps, an Austrian fan who missed Polaroid film so much that he spearheaded an effort to buy a shuttered Polaroid factory in the Netherlands and restart production. His aptly named Impossible Project now sells new film for classic Polaroid cameras, operates gallery/stores in multiple countries and generally makes the world a better and more interesting place.

Julia Angwin & Jeremy Singer-Vine:

Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users—and users’ friends—so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.

Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.



Now there are “apps”—stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To “buy” an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today’s economy: personal data.

Jessie Hicks:

Let’s start by talking about the Curator’s Code. This was introduced by Maria Popova as a way to standardize attribution in content aggregation. You were at South by Southwest when she introduced it and you later wrote about it. Why do you think something like this is important, as far as defining some rules when it comes to content aggregation?

I paid attention to it, number one, because of who was proposing it. Maria has got some of the best eyes on the web, and she is continually digging up stuff. She’s kind of an archaeologist and a futurist combined. She’s just got a way of digging stuff out of the far corners of the web that I find absolutely riveting, whether it’s on Twitter (@brainpicker) or on her blog, Brainpickings. So that’s part of it.

The other thing is, people generally talk on backchannels: ‘Oh, I had that first,’ or ‘That guy ripped me off,’ or ‘She’s always picking my pocket.’ Instead of engaging in that smacktalk, she came up with a way of defining terms and providing symbols. It was the starting point of a discussion, not the end of one. And the discussion actually got pretty heated — and sort of mean toward her, with people saying, ‘Oh, who are you to decide.’ But all she was saying was, ‘This might be an idea’ and putting it out there.



I just think that people seem less and less concerned about where their information comes from at a time when I think they should be more and more concerned about it.

Jeremy Hart:

In 1953, Joseph Stalin signed the plans for a top-secret nuclear submarine base that would become the operational home for the fearsome Soviet Black Sea Fleet.



Hidden inside the base of a mountain in the port town of Balaklava on Ukraine’s Crimean coast, the 153,000 square-foot facility took nine years to build and its entrance camouflaged from spy planes. It could survive a direct nuclear hit and at maximum capacity could hold 3,000 people with supplies to sustain them for a month. Best of all, the vast subs that slunk in and out of here between tours of duty could enter and leave underwater, keeping them from prying eyes at all times.



Once the most sensitive and secretive of Soviet Cold War hotspots, today it is preserved as a museum. I manage to get special permission to drive into the base during the 8,000-mile Land Rover Journey of Discovery expedition to Beijing. We were the first to do so since the Soviet trucks and trailers that ferried in missiles, supplies and essentials over its 40 years of operation.



Driving through the cavernous entrance carved into the heavy rock of the mountain was pure James Bond, but the base that unfolded inside was a hard-hitting mix of superspy fantasy and the coarse reality of the Cold War world in which it played a key part.

Ed Wallace:

Long before the Crusades, Islamic scholars had begun scientifically to investigate how medicines and physicians could cure man of diseases and better our ability to treat wounds. Few realize that the world’s first serious works on medicine came out of the Middle East; translated into Latin, they were used in European universities throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. (Today a rare copy of the Latin translation of the Islamic Canon of Medicine still resides at the University of Texas Health Care Center in San Antonio.) Fewer still remember that hospitals for the sick came out of the Islamic Golden Age.

Roughly 800 years later, young Henry Ford grew up seriously distrusting physicians. His disbelief in their abilities started when his mother died during childbirth; correctly or not, Ford blamed Dr. Duffield for her passing. Then shortly after his wife Clara had their son, Edsel, she underwent an operation that left her incapable of having any more children. And then, as Ford’s personal wealth grew, he realized that his family’s medical bills seemed to be rising at the same rate as his income.



Although it had been 900 years since the start of the scientific age of medicine, the average lifespan of an American male when Ford launched his first car company was still less than 60 years.



Illness and Wound Care, Not Healthcare

Ed Wallace:

A few weeks ago the automotive world was all a-flutter with the news that, as part of the first step toward finding ways to solve its financial problems in Europe, General Motors was taking a 7 percent stake in France’s Peugeot Citroen. Not mentioned in those stories is that competitors in the auto industry have been doing joint ventures for decades, but so far these very expensive plans have failed to yield much of value. More to the point, however, although it’s been the joint venture leader over the past 17 years, all GM has to show for it is the Duramax diesel engine.

To be fair, GM’s Opel in Europe has not managed to turn a profit in over a decade. Yet even in the recent discussions on the new venture with Peugeot, apparently not one automotive journalist has remembered what happened to Opel all those years ago that made it a less competitive car company in Europe.

Lois Beckett:

President Obama’s re-election campaign is reportedly building a massive database of information about potential supporters.

The database seems to bring together information about supporters gathered from all branches of the campaign — everything from an individual’s donation records to volunteer activity to online interactions with the campaign — aimed at allowing the campaign to personalize every interaction with potential supporters.

Earlier this month, we built an interactive graphic showing how different Obama supporters received different variations of the same email — one way that the campaign may be using data to personalize messages.

We can’t describe the Obama campaign’s database with certainty because the campaign won’t talk about it. Citing concerns about letting Republicans learn its tactics, the campaign declined our request for comment — as it has with other outlets — about what data the campaign collects and what it’s doing with the data. The campaign did emphasize that, regardless of what information it gathers, it has never sold voter data or shared its voter database with other candidates.