Over a year ago, I was emailing with my friend Toby Wolpe, a fellow tech writer/editor who lived outside London. I thought I might get to London in 2025, and was checking on his plans. In his reply, he said all plans were off: he had a fatal illness, and it was a matter of likely several months. I wrote back in sympathy and thanked him for his friendship.

I don’t know the rest of his family, so had no loop to be kept in; every month or two, I would look for news. Just a few days ago, I learned he had passed away in September via a posting at the local athletic club at which he was very active and clearly much loved.

Toby and I met because I admired the work of

I'm taking a break from Twitter after about nine years, more or less, and—400,000 tweets. I used the last bunch of tweets as a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, and I hope did some good! (P.S. It raised over $2,200!!)

Twitter as a company hasn't yet revised how it works to encompass disagreement and critique and yet let people block the asymmetrical harassment that regularly occurs. While I've only occasionally been a target, I see the regular toll on friends and colleagues. The lack of being able to engage simultaneously in a rich froth of discussion and yet not find yourself buried under endless messages (unable to sort friend from foe) that try to make you feel bad—it's got technical solutions, and Twitter hasn't (yet) deployed many of them. (I have some hope based on what people have said who have seen or heard glimmers.)

This

Update: Thanks to everyone who contributed! I know many people told me they'd already given to PP in recent months, but folks still gave over $2,200! Wonderful and thank you.

Original post

I'm about to hit 400,000 messages posted on Twitter since I joined in August 2007. While a terrifying number, that includes retweets (those made by others that I repost), article tweets from news sites I'm reading, and the like. I've also long used Twitter as a kind of public chat room, so many of my tweets are conversations, not posted statements for everyone to read.

But I'd like to redeem the time spent by turning my run-up to 400,000 into a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood—you can contribute here.

It's been under attack for years, most significantly with an allegedly criminal effort (two perpetrators have been charged) to mislead about both its purpose (abortion is

I started the year having just shut down The Magazine; I ended with something approximating a full-time living.

The Magazine was a labor of love, and with a lot of help and many subscribers, I was able to shepherd it through 58 fortnightly issues. But as revenue declined, I can only admit that it was a burden that was hard to handle, because I could afford to devote ever less time to it. Closing the books was time consuming and painful, but it freed up a lot of time for more productive work.

In March, a crowdfunding project to take the entire archives and put them into ebook form funded. After computer nightmares and meltdowns and an over-busy summer as a result of lost weeks of work, I finally published that

The Ashley Madison data breach is a debacle for a site that advertised itself as a place for people who broke promises. But I've been watching the response from a range of people—those I know well, acquaintances, random folks on Twitter, opinion writers, bloggers, news coverage, etc.—and there's a lot of sniggering and moralizing going on.

You can never know what the inside of a relationship looks like unless you're one of the people involved. Further, it's none of your business, either. If you think otherwise, I'd like to understand why.

In countries in which eras existed or still do in which religious strictures bind people up, then marriage or similar institutions are enforced by the state. Some American states still have adultery laws on the books, although it's extremely likely none would pass a constitutional challenge today, given the privacy rights in the bedroom established by the