Society

The news and TV have ended up taking serious threats to society and exaggerating and distorting them. In the process, we have become paranoid.

Paulo Coelho speaks at the Digital, Life, Design in Munich. He tells of how pirating his own book increased sales in Russia from 1,000 copies per year to more than a million copies. His most interesting point, though, is that "the blessing of the internet is increased human contact." Tim Harford echoes this in chapter seven of his book, The Logic of Life. It's become clear that rather than causing people to be come isolated, the internet actively encourages more human contact.

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace.