This may be the stupidest thing I have ever read in The New Yorker. One of the most glorious things about my hometown is that you do not need a car to explore any part of it. Driving and parking a car in the city (especially Manhattan) is an unnecessary hassle. Cassidy may insist on pursuing the peculiar habit of driving his beloved Jaguar everywhere, but to think that anyone else in the city should give a damn about his habit, or his resentment of bikes, is laughable.

The demand for real-time reporting also saw Al Jazeera’s live blog grow immensely popular. “At any given time there were three times more people on the live blog than on the main story [on Al Jazeera’s homepage]. Your editor usually invests [so much time] in the lead story… but if you look at the numbers, people were on the live blog hitting refresh. [So] we threw more resources into that,” Nanabhay said.

What created an environment so conducive to the spread of this epidemic? I’d put it this way. Yesterday’s institutions were built to narcotize us into sleep—and while we dozed, they purloined our future, looted our societies, trampled nature, eviscerated our communities, ransacked our values, and body-slammed our own sense of self-worth. If we ever needed a revolutionary imperative…

There is no clear road map about what to do next. In this environment, the State Department plans some good old-fashioned experimentation to discover best practices. There will probably even be an opportunity for reverse learning. “[The Egyptians] are sophisticated themselves,” Ross says. “Given the tools and resources, the Egyptian people can make the highest and best use of them.”

Open Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each connected node in the network may act as an independent router or “smart” device, regardless of whether it has an Internet connection or not. Mesh networks are incredibly robust, with continuous connections that can reconfigure around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached, such as another device on the network or connecting to an Internet back haul. When there is local Internet available, they can amplify the number of people who can connect to it.