Gene Kannenberg, Jr. finds the most well-publicized comic by one of America's most significant cartoonists to be technically accomplished, challenging as narrative but finally all too true to its title: the characters and situations in David Boring are in fact boring.

Following Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum agrees that materiality matters.

Mark Hansen responds to Linda Brigham's review of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing.

In her Sonic Spectrum survey, Elise Kermani invited readers to locate sounds on the spectrum from noise to sound to music. Here, Skip LaPlante responds with an autobiography in music, sound, and noise.

Lance Olsen reviews hypertext writing, past and present, by Robert Arellano.

Linda Brigham works through Embodying Technesis by Mark Hansen.

Jeff Parker contributes to the ongoing debate on electropoetics and invites readers to post their own link types and descriptions.

Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.

Allison Hunter writes on Douglas Kahn, a modern musicologist who takes in the noise of modern battle, recordings from the tops of trains and the interiors of coalmines, and the musicality of undigitized everyday noise.

Elizabeth Wall Hinds reviews Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, winner of the James Black Memorial Fiction Prize and the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Linda Brigham offers a Deleuzean take on Independence Day.

Jaishree K. Odin on the hyperfiction of M.D. Coverley.

noise poem: Raymond Federman. audio recording and production: Eric Dean Rasmussen and Shaun Sandor

The msn thread originated in the Fall of 2001 as an ebr special co-edited by Cary Wolfe, Mark Amerika, and Joseph Tabbi.

Cary Wolfe investigates why the reviewers were so rattled by the Lars von Trier film, and in the process puts Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler into conversation.