Entertainment Weekly has been getting attention for being the first magazine to have video ads in its printed pages, in its upcoming September 15 issue. We don’t read EW, but maybe we will now. The video will be stored on a paper-thin screen, inserted into a page with a little cut-out window, which hold up to 40 minutes of video. These screens are designed by the firm Americhip, which is also working on digital sound and smell, and are much cooler than what you’ll find here.

I am the one and only “Alexandra Heifetz” on Google. Everything I do, everything I write, every job I’ve had—every time I’m mentioned on the internet—is something a future employer, a new acquaintance, a long-lost classmate, can see. There’s no one else to hide behind. Unlike Anne Smith, clothed by the highs and lows of other Anne Smiths, my face is bared on the internet. And there’s even a Google tattoo on it—one public to the public and hardly one I would have intended to have. The top Google hit for “Alexandra Heifetz” is something I spent, actually, months trying to hide—and its continuous presence as the top search result is something that still bothers me.

MagCloud is a print-on-demand publishing service that prints, mails and manages the subscriptions of your magazine. The only thing you really have to do is to upload a PDF of your mag, create a PayPal account, and find some way to pay for MagCloud services. When someone orders an issue, Magcloud custom-prints it for 20 cents per page and ships it for you. The costs for a 20-page magazine would therefore add up to $4 plus shipping, and how much you end up charging for the issue is entirely up …

My mother gave up smoking when she decided to have kids. Composing, too—she’d published a few contemporary pieces, which still sell modestly today. When I was in my early teens, my mother decided to have reel-to-reel recordings of the performances of her compositions transferred to standard cassettes, so they’d be durable for years to come. I remember the process costing hundreds of dollars. It was all in vain: a couple years later, we got our first CD player. At the time it didn’t see valuable to pay another fee to …

Last weekend I visited Teufelsberg, an artificial mountain in the district of Grunewald, Berlin. A friend had told me about the rotting, awesome Cold War NSA Field Station on top—and this really ended up being the sight worthiest seeing far and wide. Digging deeper, I found that Teufelsberg is not as much a mountain as it is a huge pile of historical debris, as if a giant Beuys had decided to sweep up 20th-century Berlin, heap it up and wait for someone to write the caption. So far this has …