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Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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The New York Observer calls him, "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." Madrigal co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.

'The Finest Piece of Anti-iPhone Propaganda Ever Written'

By Alexis Madrigal
Aug 1 2010, 2:55 PM ET Comment

Super talented novelist Gary Shteyngart (A Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan) has a new book out, Super Sad True Love Story. Some people are reading it as an anti-technology morality play, particularly after his New York Times essay, "Only Disconnect" revealed his feelings about the " techno-fugue state." The Village Voice's Rob Harvilla introduced the book by calling it "the finest piece of anti-iPhone propaganda ever written":

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story tries to be many things--tragicomic 1984 update, poignant May-December romance per the title, heartfelt tribute to the nostalgic joys of plain ol' books--and succeeds at most of them. But primarily, it's the finest piece of anti-iPhone propaganda ever written, a cautionary tale full of distracted drones unwilling to tear themselves away from their little glowing screens long enough to make eye contact, let alone an actual lasting connection, with another human being. It's super sad 'cause it's true, but that also makes it hilarious.

Read the full story at Village Voice.

(I'm actually headed to Bus Boys and Poets to pick up the book now, but I'd be curious to know if any of you had devoured it yet. My suspicious, having read Shteyngart's previous work, is that he's too interesting to present completely unalloyed technophobia.)

Update: The ever-vigilant James Fallows spotted an omitted lower-case "i" in the headline.


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