Thanks, Internet

The Internet makes this magazine possible.

Yet, as we were reminded by two closely-spaced incidents in January, the Internet is very much a double-edged sword (the indicents came, of course, while as were preparing a story on the Russian Internet).

The first incident came on a Thursday. An attentive blogger notified us that our Calendar Editor had, for her biography of Alexander Men [Jan/Feb 2005], copied several lengthy passages from two online articles. The Internet (particularly its Russian incarnation) is not a stickler for laws of copyright and she mistakenly concluded this information was in the public domain. Nonetheless, she should have credited the source, but she did not. We editors should have questioned her sources, but we did not. For these breaches, we apologize to our readers and to the authors Yakov Krotov and Vladimir Zelinsky, who should have been properly credited for their work.