Radio Free Everywhere

The iPod shows you mainly what’s already going on in your head—it’s cool, but only as cool as solipsism can ever be. I’ve got a way cooler device: a squat little box that sits on your kitchen counter or your bedside table and connects you to pretty much the entire Earth. And in so doing makes you think anew about the global and the local and what community amounts to—makes you think about connection, which is, after all, the main topic of our age. It’s a kind of home epistemology center that also happens to rock.

Or croon, or wail, or chat, or do anything else a radio can do. Because that’s all I’m talking about: a table radio, though one that, assuming you have a broadband connection and wireless network in your house, lets you tune in ...