Big Ideas Author Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattanite of the New Yorker, has issued a smackdown review of Free, the book from Big Ideas Author Chris Anderson, a Berkeleyan of San Francisco's Wired. If that's not provocative enough, Gladwell sounds downright grumpy.

California's liberal millionaires have turned the Tesla Motors waiting list into a thing of wonder. It's thousands of dollars just to sign up. But company bigwigs fetishize their electric vehicle just as irrationally, a lawsuit reveals. Heartening.

Our dreams have come true! New Yorker contributor and Twitterati regular Susan Orlean is whaling away on whiny, blogorrheic ex-staff writer Dan Baum on Twitter. Grab some popcorn, follow @susanorlean and @danielsbaum, and enjoy!

What a fight! In one corner, Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow, the liberal lesbian MSNBC commentator. In the other, arch libertarian chess master Peter Thiel, the gay Facebook investor. Best of all, they've squared off before.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former COO, is officially taking over MySpace, News Corp.'s social network. With its user numbers stagnant, MySpace desperately needs a restart. Is Van Natta the guy to do it?

Google wants to be your Web browser, not just your search engine, which is why it unveiled Chrome last fall, a rival to Firefox. Now we hear Google's ready to hit Firefox in the pocketbook.

Twitteronia is abuzz this morning: Some Twitter messages on the most mundane details of their lives are not getting automatically posted to Facebook, too. It must be censorship or something!

Is Marissa Mayer, Google's cupcake princess, driving away talent with her icy indifference and utter lack of management skills? One ex-Googler says yes. Here's Anne Halsall's tale of getting dissed by Mayer at a meeting:

When will Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wake up and realize he made an idiotic mistake by copying Twitter? The Facebook-loving masses loathe the new look — as do Facebook's best pals in Silicon Valley.

Dave Winer, the old guy who takes credit for blogging, podcasting, and other tech trends, is mad at Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Why? Because Williams is making people — people who are not Dave Winer — famous.

A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.

Google executive Marissa Mayer, best known for her ballgowns, cupcakes, and whimsical designs, feels that the media has ignored her athletic achievements. But how does she compare to rivals like Mrs. Bill Gates?

One of the messes Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz must clean up is a three-year-old investigation into claims of discrimination by a black female lawyer. After a leak of confidential documents, it's now even messier.

Flack April Dunford did not instantly return a call from hack David George-Cosh of Canada's National Post. He got mad. She turned to Twitter to vent her annoyance. He got even madder! How mad?

After years of freezing out cofounder Eduardo Saverin over a dispute about money, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has deigned to recognize his former Harvard buddy. Why now? Perhaps to derail a forthcoming Facebook tell-all?

Dude, Russia's not getting a Dell. That's a polite version of what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia's testy KGB agent turned autocrat, told Michael Dell in Davos. Dell's sin? After Putin delivered a fiery 40-minute sermon about the doom of the West, Dell asked if there was any way his company could help Russia with its computers. Yes, he gave a tacky sales pitch at the high-minded World Economic Forum. But he didn't deserve the tongue-lashing Putin gave him next, as reported by Fortune: "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity."

What did Steve Jobs do to his old buddy Bono? The Irish rock star, once the Apple CEO's adoring buddy, is funding the most credible threat to the iPhone yet.

It's a classic geek insult: A Google executive has called the Wall Street Journal "confused" about its stance on whether companies should be able to buy themselves a fast lane on the Internet.

With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of individual websites from your own future searches. For example, grudge-o-matic TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington can click his own posts to the top of any Google search he performs. With one more click, he can remove Valleywag entirely from his life. That frees us to post as many photos of Big Mike's girlfriends as we want. Everybody wins! Personal note to Google engineer Amay: Next time you make a video, try to go longer than seven seconds without saying "cool."

One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl "No-Fun" Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day. Take the latest tiff we happened to hear about — in the social network's business-development department, the home of glad-handing charmers who negotiate deals. You'd think they'd be experts at sucking up to each other. Tim Kendall (shown left), the company's director of monetization — Valleyspeak for "guy who comes up with ideas to make money" — was left fuming after his boss, VP Dan Rose, instructed him in the art of time management."Every day, you need to create a to-do list," Rose told Kendall. "You put the items you need to do on the list, and you need to review the list with me every day. As you do them, you need to cross them off." Kendall's retort, which he delivered not to Rose but to friends within and without Facebook: "No shit Sherlock, I didn't get to where I am today without knowing how to manage a to-do list!" What's odd about this rumor: Rose doesn't have a reputation as a micromanager, and the two both worked at Amazon.com before joining Facebook. They put on a convincing buddy act for the New York Times recently, too. Anyone care to play Encyclopedia Brown and help piece together this puzzle? My only conclusion: The best algorithms can't predict what will break a friendship. (Photo by Chris Pan)