On the Wire | What the New iPhone Will Look Like

DISCLAIMER: This is not the new iPhone. You really think we're cool enough to have the first screenshot? Pssh. This is just a dumb stock photo. Look at it up there... geez... that hand model has nice fingernails. 

By Farhad Manjoo 

Slate.com

The new iPhone looks pretty much like the old iPhone. Sure, it's a bit taller, allowing for a display that has one extra row of icons on the Home screen. And instead of the glass that you find on the back of today's iPhone, the new model's posterior is composed mainly of some kind of metal — either stainless steel or aluminum that has been polished and, in the case of the black version, treated by a chemical process to turn it a dark, matte gray. (On the white model, the metal on the back looks untreated.)

The other difference is the dock connector — instead of the inch-wide plug that Apple has placed on almost every iPod, iPhone and iPad since 2003, the new iPhone will inaugurate a new, tiny plug that we'll presumably find on all of Apple's other devices, too. Finally, and strangely, the headphone jack is now on the bottom of the phone, rather than the top.

But that's it.

What It's Like for Girl Gamers

Horrendous stock photo courtesy of Metro Creative Connection - I'm so, so sorry

By Elisa Meléndez
Slate.com 

I am a gamer and a geek. I'm at the computer writing this in a Star Trek T-shirt, in celebration of the recent Mars Curiosity rover landing. I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember, having had a Nintendo Power magazine thrust into my hands as soon as I could sound out the words on the page in order to be my older brother's co-pilot.

Since then, I have developed a fierce love of games. I have a tattoo of a Trivial Pursuit pie on my right hip. My haircut resembles one of my favorite characters, Lilith, from Borderlands. You can't tell me Revolution X wasn't amazing. You just can't.

This may sound like I'm trying to validate my geek cred. I shouldn't have to prove anything, you're right, but there are those determined to limit my rise in the gaming world. Though 47 percent of all gamers are women and though many of us are equal in our skills and drive to the men, we are often not welcome. The gamers who still aren't ready for us resort to online harassment to belittle, silence and drive us away from their precious boys' club.

Meeting our cultural overlords at Comic-Con

SAN DIEGO — I understand the allure of comic books. Stunning artwork. Twisting plots. Serial cliffhangery.

What I've never been clear on is why this visual and narrative approach is so pressed into the service of stories about people who wear capes and fly through the air. How did it come to be that comic books -- and comic-book-inspired movies, and the fans who adore those movies, and the culture at large -- are all deeply obsessed with the notion of the superhero?

Thursday afternoon at Comic-Con, I attended a panel that I hoped might shed some light on the matter. A group of academics had convened in a medium-size conference room to explore the past and the future of superhero studies. What flavor of seminar was this? Let us note that when the projector clicked on, the first slide was a photo of Carl Jung.