Nick Summers

Blowing a zombie's head off with a sniper rifle is one of life's simple pleasures. But is it art? Videogames have become a massive industry, bringing in tens of billions annually and occupying more than an hour of 8- to 18-year-olds' time each day, but the medium struggles for recognition.

Alvin Greene, the surprise Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, has a way with words. It's the way, though, of Sarah Palin and George W. Bush—a tortured relationship with the English language that prevents him from making his points, and that says to voters he may not be up to the job.

How do you get the kids excited for Christmas morning when they already know what's under the tree? Just make sure there are a hell of a lot of presents.

If you've been jonesing for a work of tragic reportage about the demise of an American city ever since The Wire went off the air, this is the book for you. It's an exhaustively researched—and reargued—history of the fires that consumed New York in the late 1960s and '70s.

Struggling to keep up with the pace of smart-phone adoption in the United States, AT&T announced that it will eliminate its unlimited-data plans for the devices and replace them with a two-tiered system.

In February, Yahoo got to watch with schadenfreude as Google drove its new Buzz social network straight over a cliff with inadequate privacy controls. Now Yahoo has decided it wants to head for pretty much the same cliff, just with a slightly firmer grip on the wheel.

The spate of troubling suicides at Foxconn Technology Group, a major Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics, presents a problem for companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell—and their gleaming, precision-engineered reputations.

When the GOP unveiled a new web site, 'America Speaking Out,' it promised to "change the way Congress works by proposing ideas for a new policy agenda." Visitors are invited to make their own suggestions in four broad categories. But all those visitors haven't been playing by the rules.

Stocks across the globe opened dramatically lower today in response to North Korea's reported threat to take military action against South Korea, as well as deepening worries over the Bank of Spain's bailout of a major bank.

On Oct. 1, The Social Network, an Aaron Sorkin–penned movie about the site's controversial founding, hits theaters. A draft screenplay circulating now is a brutal read. Based on Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver. Nothing sways public opinion like a movie—and this scorcher could counteract the entire body of good press Facebook has received till now.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch had his eyes on The Wall Street Journal for decades, and on May 2, 2007, he set a plan in motion that would pry the world's leading financial newspaper out of the hands of the bickering Bancroft family. Sarah Ellison tells the inside-the-boardroom story of that $5 billion acquisition.

Is $1.2 billion a lot or a little for Hewlett-Packard to pay for Palm? With the acquisition, HP gains an instant foothold in the mobile Internet market—but it ain't much of one.

The 30-second spot didn't always exist. Someone had to invent it. Same goes for the full-page magazine ad, the couple-of-minutes-long movie trailer, and, much more recently, the Google search ad.

Promoted Tweets launched because Twitter-friendly companies are worried that their updates are getting lost almost as soon as they're posted, amid the site's 50 million, and counting, tweets per day.

 "Sweetie, I know you just dumped me for a guy with more money, bigger muscles, a faster car, and great hair. But remember, I, uh ... I have the complete collection of state quarters. That counts for something, right? Right?" On its home page, Amazon's ads for the Kindle—the grayscale, static screen, no-apps-or-Internet Kindle—are reduced to grasping at straws.

Net neutrality isn't a fair fight. It's an abstract issue concerning whether Internet service providers can treat different kinds of data in different ways, and to understand it, people mainly look to see who's on which side of the battle.

Fishbowl NY has a nice and lengthy interview this week with Newsweek's Mark Coatney, the senior articles editor who helms the magazine's Tumblr blog. Writes Fishbowl: One of the first major publications to make its presence felt on Tumblr, Newsweek has been one of the pioneers of the social-media/blogging site.

It's the kind of outcome most entrepreneurs only dream of. Last September, the financial-planning startup Mint.com was acquired by Intuit for $170 million-earning its founder a reported $20 million.

The reviews for the iPad are in, and predictably, they're raves. "Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad," says Ed Baig in USA Today. "This beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly," trumpets The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg.

The new rules of management for people who hate rules. And management.

  On a desktop computer, your choice of browser says a lot. Using the copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer that came with your PC screams "novice"—even though recent versions of IE are much improved, the program is still a symbol of an Internet that was slow, buggy, and insecure.

China's decision today to block access to Google's search sites represents a dramatic, but perhaps inevitable, escalation in the conflict between the open search service and the closed government. (UPDATE 12:35 p.m.: Google spokesperson Christine Chen said in an email to NEWSWEEK that while the full site is not currently blocked, "certain sensitive queries" are.

It's easy to get numbed by the traffic stats for Facebook: more than 400 million users, the average user spends 55 minutes a day on the site, 3 billion photo uploads per month.

On March 18, 1990, two thieves stole $500 million in art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—including works by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. None have been seen since (their frames hang empty). Art theft may sound glamorous, but such high-class crimes rarely pay.

Last night's Oscars broadcast was interminable even by Oscars standards, but viewers who managed to stay awake were rewarded with Apple's first advertisement for its iPad tablet device.

What's the most wrong you've ever been?I mean really wrong. Not, like, getting-the-capital-of-Illinois wrong. Not predicting-the-Mets-to-win-the-World-Series wrong.

After a recent ski trip in California with friends, I needed to reimburse one of them for the rental gear she'd picked up on my behalf. Except I didn't have my checkbook handy, and she didn't have an account with PayPal.

Some 75,000 computers at 2,500 corporations around the world have been compromised by a botnet attack that has been in progress for more than a year, according to a Virginia-based security firm.

In December, a delegation from Google visited the NEWSWEEK offices to make the case that the search giant was bullish on privacy. They touted recent decisions to reduce the length of time that Google stores users' search histories, new measures to anonymize data, and other considerations meant to improve users' peace of mind as they entrust the company with more and more of their personal information.

It's become the Internet's most predictable phenomenon: whenever Facebook redesigns its site, users revolt by the millions. Each major upgrade, from the 2006 introduction of its news feed to its 2009 redesign, has been a seismic event.