Digital Age

TULSA, Okla. - Jim Thavisay is secretly stalking one of his classmates. And one of them is spying on him. "I have an idea who it is, but I'm not 100% sure yet," said Thavisay, a 25-year-old former casino blackjack dealer. Stalking is part of the curriculum in the Cyber Corps, an unusual two-year program at the University of Tulsa that teaches students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage. Students learn not only how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook.

Name your favorite, the one book that most sticks in your mind. Over nearly four years, photographer Catherine Wagner made that request of friends, acquaintances and outright strangers. She kept a tally on her iPhone and turned the top vote-getters into the spine of her latest work, "trans/literate," an homage to books - the cardboard and paper sort that some predict won't survive the 21st century. The list of titles and authors reads like an exceptionally weighty version of English 101. "Most people went back to their teenage years, to high school or college," Wagner said.

What are you doing on your summer vacation? Relaxing at the beach? Enjoying friends and family? Or are you checking your smartphone every five minutes? It's the essential predicament of the Digital Age. Even on vacation. It's tempting to blame our tools, the BlackBerrys and the iPhones that keep us so connected and busy. But the real problem isn't the technologies; it's us. We've convinced ourselves that the more connected we are, the better. We never give ourselves a break.

David Copperfield was supposed to visit the set of NBC's "Today" show last week, but when his flight had to make an emergency landing in Illinois the network went to Plan B - an interview with the illusionist from a hangar in Peoria. Host Matt Lauer was game but technology wasn't. NBC's Skype connection produced bad audio and grainy images of a cheesy illusion that probably only served to make viewers disappear. Just as that segment stumbled to an end, "Today" cameras caught comedian Chelsea Handler awkwardly walking onto the set before her hosts were ready to greet her. It was amateur-hour television and exemplified the struggles at the once-dominant NBC show.

Are you an ultra-modern new parent who wants to raise kids the tried-and-tested midcentury way? "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care," the bestselling child-rearing bible, will be available as an ebook starting next week, Skyhorse Publishing has announced. Dr. Spock's manual has sold more than 50 million copies and gone through nine editions since its initial publication in 1946; now parents can read it on Kindle, Nook or iPad. Three other Dr. Spock books have already made the ebook leap: "Dr. Spock's The School Years," "Dr. Spock's The First Two Years" and "Dr. Spock's Pregnancy Guide.

Newsstand owner Robert Kelly is well aware that he's not in the most profitable of businesses these days. But, at 58, he says it's too late to get out of the print business. Plus, he enjoys having a front-row seat to the comings and goings in Los Feliz. Kelly has become a fixture at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, where he has operated his newsstand for 11 years, greeting neighbors and regulars by name and instinctively reaching for their favorite magazine or newspaper when they approach.

Two months after Eastman Kodak Co.declared bankruptcy, another household name is succumbing to the relentless march of technology. Encyclopaedia Britannica announced Tuesday that it is discontinuing its best-known product, the 32-volume collection of reference material on everything from aardvarks to zygotes. The company is shifting its focus to the Internet, where it offers a virtual version of its books and a slate of fee-based educational services. The company's ability to sell pricey bound volumes for 244 years is a testament not just to the power of its brand, but also to the demand for a convenient, reliable source of information.

Like many great satires, Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" imagines a dystopian future eerily reminiscent of our present world, one in which invasive social networking threatens his characters' sanity and their souls. To research the book, the reserved novelist had to break down and buy an iPhone. The change in his life, according to Shteyngart, has been nerve-wracking. "It's hard to focus. It's hard to have a conversation without checking the iPhone. It's hard to go to a shrink and spend a few minutes on the couch and not need to see what's happening.

For the last week or so, I've been dipping in and out of a long-forgotten piece of Southern California literature: Timothy G. Turner's short story collection “Turn Off the Sunshine: Tales of Los Angeles on the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” published by the Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1942. If you've never heard of the author, book or publisher, you're not alone; a Google search reveals little except for various online booksellers offering digital copies for download.

Television writer-producer Jill Soloway turned off her electronic devices for 24 hours last Saturday and spent the morning playing with her 2-year-old son in her yard in Silver Lake. "It was excruciating and kind of wonderful. I struggled with a feeling of anxiety that there was something in my inbox I needed to tend to," she said. "Then came a moment when it felt like a holiday. Holiday means holy day. What a huge gift. " Soloway, executive producer of the Showtime series "United States of Tara," and a self-described smartphone junkie, was taking part in the "National Day of Unplugging," organized by Reboot, a group of urban media professionals who try to reconnect with Jewish tradition in a way that is meaningful to their hectic lives.

For the last week or so, I've been dipping in and out of a long-forgotten piece of Southern California literature: Timothy G. Turner's short story collection “Turn Off the Sunshine: Tales of Los Angeles on the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” published by the Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1942. If you've never heard of the author, book or publisher, you're not alone; a Google search reveals little except for various online booksellers offering digital copies for download.

Drive-in theaters threatened with extinction by the digital revolution are getting a helping hand. The National Assn. of Theatre Owners and the company Cinedigm, which supplies digital equipment and content to the exhibition industry, said they will help drive-in theaters secure financing to pay for the cost of converting from film to digital projectors. Most drive-in theaters, which are independently owned and seasonally operated, have not yet converted to digital, raising the prospect that many will be left behind when studios stop releasing movies on actual film sometime this year.

News Corp. is pulling the plug on its high-profile but money-losing digital-only news magazine The Daily on Dec. 15. The company created the product as an application for the iPad to try to compete in the digital age. But The Daily was unable to keep pace with more established print titles. "The brand will live on in other channels," News Corp. said in a statement. The technology used for the application and some staff will be folded into the company's print tabloid the New York Post.

News Corp.'s the Daily will expire on Dec. 15, the company announced Monday. The tablet -only periodical was the first of its kind, a newspaper that was published for the iPad alone initially. After its first year, it branched out, expanding to the Kindle Fire and other Android devices. Rupert Murdoch launched the Daily with much fanfare in February 2011. Its executive editor, Jesse Angelo, will become publisher of the New York Post, another News Corp. property. News Corp.

The quirky violist known as Ljova, an ingratiating fixture on the New York new music scene, has just released a recording called "Melting River. " You can purchase and download it for as little as $2 on the artist-friendly website Bandcamp as either an inferior MP3 file or an HD-resolution FLAC file. Ljova says that there will be no physical release. "Unless we can find sponsorship for a vinyl release," he writes in an email, "the days of physical CDs are over. :)" The days of CDs aren't quite over - thousands of new ones come out every month.

TULSA, Okla. - Jim Thavisay is secretly stalking one of his classmates. And one of them is spying on him. "I have an idea who it is, but I'm not 100% sure yet," said Thavisay, a 25-year-old former casino blackjack dealer. Stalking is part of the curriculum in the Cyber Corps, an unusual two-year program at the University of Tulsa that teaches students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage. Students learn not only how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook.

We are going digital. We are also going to Ireland, but in terms of lifestyle shifts and general surrender, going digital is bigger. For years now, our friends have been sending us photos over the Internet, with mixed results (if we had to do anything more than click on it, we couldn't open it) or giving us discs full of images from trips and birthday parties and Christmas bakeoffs.

In a bygone age, there were movie palaces. They were ornate and grand. And as you sat in your seat, you looked to a large, red velvet curtain. Behind it, hidden from view, the silver screen. And they made you wait to see it. It was that special. Then suddenly there were images that you could see through the curtain. And there it was, the glorious movie screen. But that's gone. That was another time. Today, the screen can be big or small. We can watch a film on IMAX, we can watch on our iPhone.

Josh Glenn is the co-editor of " Unbored ," a new illustrated book for kids ages 8 to 13 -- and their parents -- about making things and doing things. Hack an average water gun to make it a remote-control water gun. Start a rock band. Create your own board game. Mark Frauenfelder, in addition to being one of the founders of BoingBoing , is the editor of Make Magazine . In his introduction to Unbored, he writes, "We live in a culture of experts who like to say 'Don't try this at home.' That's rubbish.