Colliding Michigan demographics; the novelty of AOL chat rooms.

"So me and Little Tom were sitting on the couch watching television, not so much in the mood to do anything else having been witness to the worst kind of execution.'Wish you had a computer,' I said finally. 'AOL is so great. You know about it?' Pause. 'You have AOL down there?'"

It mostly had to do with Patch, the executive’s hyperlocal and unprofitable baby.

On the TechCrunch founder’s venture capital fund, and a new breed of startup investor.

As Twitter-loving VC investors have become brand names themselves (Fred Wilson, Marc Andreessen, Chris Sacca), what one might call the auteur theory of venture capitalism has emerged—the idea that startup companies bear the unique creative signature of those who invested in them. To study a venture capitalist’s portfolio is to study his oeuvre.

The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.

A profile of Arianna Huffington.