At least, when we finally get there, the New York winter sunshine is the same. You see your breath in the glitter, and people are still out, all bundled up, in Union Square. So not everybody's sitting home and emailing! There's still hope for us.

"I'm just looking for somebody to talk to," says a plaintive, kindly voice, its possessor's back to us, sitting on the steps.

Boy, so are we. "Hello!"

Our new friend unhappily moves the cell phone from his face, points at it. "I'm, um, talking to my friend?"

"Ah," we say. "Aha."

We are a ghost.

+ + +

"Right now, terrorists are trying to kill me.
My wife and family are faraway,
and the people I work with are idiots.
My name is SFC John H.
I am a US Soldier.
This has been the longest year of my life."
—from the blog John of Arabia

Never have soldiers in a war been equipped with so much personal technology. It's not just backpack missiles. "You literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket," grumbled journalist Kevin Sites in his blog. Sites would later videotape a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed man in a mosque, provoking international controversy, but that day in Kuwait, still waiting to cross the border, the image that stayed with him was the glow of laptops, temporarily left alone by their users: "One by one, the ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appear[ed] from the depths of cyberspace—as screensavers." Read More