Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. Essay by Vanessa Layne.

“CanonicalTomes is a volunteer-created, volunteer-administered, and user-contributed database of books or other works which define their respective domains. The hope is that in time, someone approaching a field for the first time, or someone from within the field looking for the best reference will find herein the consensus of their peers.”
It’s rather young yet, so go make your mark on it!

Some public-spirited person has posted [and soon thereafter removed] all of Playboy’s centerfolds from Norma Jean to Miss October 2002. (I can’t resist a complete series of anything at all interesting.) It’s not without interest to compare the earlier and the later. The pseudo-candid style was established very early on; often a narrative is suggested, though sometimes a puzzling one:
( . . more . . )

Do you enjoy dictionaries as much as I do? The Office of National Drug Control Policy (boo hiss) publishes this one: Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade.
(Link provided by Michael Travers, as an aside from a digression about drugs as metaphor for programming languages.)

Teller doesn’t talk, but he writes. His story A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties, a sequel to Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” (which I read sometime in the Eighties), almost makes me wish I’d thought of making the same pilgrimage.

Teller’s account is now behind the subscribers-only gate, so I’ll summarize. Enoch Soames “was” a minor writer who sold his soul for an opportunity to see what his reputation would be after a hundred years. The Devil brought Soames to the British Library on a specified date in 1997, then returned him to his friends in 1897. Teller (and a few others, independently) went to the Library on that date to see if anything would happen. Something did.

Soames reported that everyone in 1997 wore numbered yellow jumpsuits, if memory serves; but Teller did not touch on that point.

Periodic Table of Science Fiction: Michael Swanwick is writing a short-short story for each of the elements, one a week.

I am anticipating the day when the possession of Tibet and Afghanistan will be represented as vitally necessary to the security of Kansas and Nebraska. There is no logical end to this elastic conception of ‘security’ short of the conquest of the whole world.

Attributed to William Henry Chamberlin: “War – Shortcut to Fascism,” American Mercury LI, 204 (December 1940). In a .sig on the Armchair Economists mailing list.