My cover story for WIRED magazine about Foxconn, the spate of suicides last year, and what it means for the consumer of the goods these workers make is now online. (The URL still reflects the work-in-progress name of the piece, which is about as accurate as they come: “Joel In China”.

It’s hard not to look at the nets. Every building is skirted in them. They drape every precipice, steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk, loosely tangled like volleyball nets in winter.

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

My tour guides don’t mention the nets until I do. Not to avoid the topic, I don’t think—the suicides are the reason I am at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city in southern China—but simply because they are so prevalent. Foxconn, the single largest private employer in mainland China, manufactures many of the products—motherboards, camera components, MP3 players—that make up the world’s $150 billion consumer-electronics industry. Foxconn’s output accounts for nearly 40 percent of that revenue. Altogether, the company employs about a million people, nearly half of whom work at the 20-year-old Shenzhen plant. But until two summers ago, most Americans had never heard of Foxconn.

That all changed with the suicides.

To be honest, at this point I just want to walk away from all this for a while. But I feel like after sending up flares last week to ask for help, the least I can do is tell everyone what I know now. Thank you for all your kind words, advice, and support. I [...]

I wrote this yesterday in an email to a friend. Woke to the news that my stepfather has decided he is no longer gay due to a serendipitous encounter with an old pastor at Panera Bread and has returned to my mother’s house with the intent to take out all their available cash and invest [...]

A new industry analysis piece on Gizmodo, Forget Apple TV. AirPlay Is Apple’s Sneak Attack On Television: The wild card, as usual, is Apple’s willingness to play nice with non-Apple standards. Since Apple has to approve the licensing for every AirPlay certified device—just like the lucrative “Made for iPod” scheme of years past—they could, in [...]

Anne Lukeman took Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work and turned it into a teaching tool for filmmakers. It lends itself especially well to noir.

John McAfee might be his own worst enemy—at least when it comes to the press. When I arrived in Belize, Quorumex staffers were still reeling from what they felt was a hit piece of McAfee in Fast Company, which painted McAfee as an arrogant huckster on the run from lawsuits in the United States, including [...]

Another piece on Gizmodo, which is getting less traffic than a reposted XKCD comic. “Disabled Explorers In the World’s Most Badass Short Bus” [Gizmodo]

My latest piece on Gizmodo, which is one of my favorites: “Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.” * * * The [...]

The first time I ever came in anyone’s mouth, it was into the mouth of my stepfather. He had slipped into my room while I slept, crawled under my covers from below, and gone down on me. I woke only as I began to ejaculate, pleasure masking confusion. Then, shame. I pushed him off of [...]

I wrote this around the New Year for Gizmodo, but for some reason (it’s super fruity?) it got lost in the shuffle, so here it is. Fire was not the first technology. It was the alphabet. By allowing us to tell a story, the transmission of knowledge blossomed, from myth to story to joke. And [...]