Awaiting the future of fiction. (Photo: Plympton, via Instagram)

Still more evidence that Twitter means business about its positioning as a media brand: In an event today at the New York Public Library, head of editorial programming Andrew Fitzgeraldannounced a Twitter Fiction Festival, a wholly virtual event that'll run November 28 to December 2.

The goal, according to Mr. Fitzgerald, is to "push the outward bounds of what people thing of when they think of content on Twitter."

The announcement was made at a panel, in concert with the New Yorker and organized by the serial fictioneers at Plympton, on the future of fiction. (Judging from the tote bags and hashtagged tweets, the crowd was heavy on publishing types.)

Before inviting New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman to the stage to discuss the live-tweeting of Jennifer Egan's "Black Box," Mr. Fitzgerald gave a brief presentation, titled "Twitter is for storytelling." Surely you can guess the theme?

Most of us default to tweets when we think about content on Twitter, but Mr. Fitzgerald wants you to reconsider. He pointed to several examples of experiments that move storytelling beyond the simple 140-character format. There was Teju Cole's seven-part response to Kony 2012, which was essentially an essay. There are characters like @karlthefog, a baleful version of the San Francisco fog, and @MayorEmanuel, which began as a parody account and evolved into a kind of semi-dystopian, parallel-world-skipping science fiction story.

All in all, every day there are over 400 million tweets sent. That amounts to something like 80,000 novels worth of content, daily. (Some of these novels, though, are surely better than others.)

It also makes a nice complement to television programming, he pointed out. He used the illustration of Community, which carried on a kind of parallel Twitterverse plotline, as several characters live-tweeted helping someone move.

More than that, Mr. Fitzgerald argued, Twitter is a "global, realtime broadcast platform in its infancy," and a wide-open frontier for experimentation. He really spun this metaphor out, complete with powerpoint image of the Nebraska frontier and a final call for us to get out there and pioneer some narratives. Twitter wants to "invite people to go out on this frontier and start building some structures--we're asking all of you to go out and stake your claim and begin building the future of storytelling."

And so the festival is an attempt to encourage even more of this. Featured will be a minimum of 10 to 12 stories, though the number might be much larger.  "We think it's important to do this sort of experimentation, to see how far we can go with the tweet and beyond the tweet," he explained.

Submissions open today.

The titillating cartoon in question. (Photo: Mick Stevens, The New Yorker)

Despite what those skimpy bikini pics in your news feed might indicate, Facebook has really been cracking down on nudity recently. Even camel toes are inappropriate now! But what about cartoon imagery? Surely line-drawn naked bodies are art, are they not?

Actually...not. Turns out Facebook has become so prudish that they temporarily banned the New Yorker's official page because one of its cartoons was deemed too racy.

According to The New Yorker, they were banned from Facebook for posting a Mick Stevens cartoon that depicts a naked Adam and Eve with their nipples--just two sets of plain black dots--showing. But even naked biblical characters or artistically rendered depictions of female nipples (male nipples are A-O.K.) are against Facebook's rules.

New Yorker Facebook commenters are rightly outraged: "Women have boobs. Boobs have nipples. Grow up and move on!" wrote one named Ben Mixter.

Ross Thompson had another explanation. "It's all because Mark Zuckerberg had so much trouble getting laid in college," he wrote. "Everything Facebook has done since then flows from that."

Hmm, maybe he's on to something--Aaron Sorkin, is that you?

(Photo: Apple)

If you are using a few years' worth of never-cracked New Yorkers piled precariously on top of each other as a makeshift coffee table, you might want to curb your packrat tendencies by downloading the new New Yorker iPhone app. It's out today! How's that for a hoarding intervention?

According to All Things D:

If you’ve used the New Yorker’s iPad app, then you’ll have a very good sense of what you’re getting here: All of the magazine’s content, along with a small handful of digital goodies, delivered to your device via Apple’s Newsstand.

Of course, this also gives you yet another platform on which to feel guilty about never finishing an issue of the New Yorker. There's just so many words! We much prefer scroll-friendly lists of photos.

The new iPhone app will be free for print subscribers in the Apple Newsstand, but you can also buy a digital subscription. Apparently this month's issue is free for this week, so download it ASAP to be sure to get your fix of error-ridden Jonah Lehrer articles.

The New Yorker

"He's a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language," Dan Kaminsky, one of the country's top internet security experts, said of Mr. (or Ms.) Nakamoto. "He understands economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networking. Either there's a team of people who worked on this, or this guy is a genius."

Mr. Davis started following Mr. Nakamoto's trail of online writing, and noticed that, after an initial post announcing Bitcoin that used American spelling, the programmer used the British spelling, referred to London newspapers and at one point using the phrase "bloody hard"--suggesting he had lived or studied in the U.K. or Ireland.

Mr. Davis headed to the close-knit cryptography conference Crypto 2011 to find more traces of Nakamoto. He found nine attendees who fit the bill. Two were dismissive of Bitcoin; two had no history with large software projects. Then Mr. Davis started looking into a man named Michael Clear.

Clear was a young graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College in Dublin. Many of the other research students at Trinity posted profile pictures and phone numbers, but CLear's page just had an e-mail address. A web search turned up three interesting details. In 2008, Clear was named the top computer-science undergraduate at Trinity. The next year, he was hired by Allied AIrish Banks to improve its currency-trading software, and he co-authored an academic paper on peer-to-peer technology. The paper employed British spelling. Clear was well-versed in economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networks.

(Mr. Clear was also 23 years old and fluent in C++.)

Finally I asked, "Are you Satoshi?"

He laughed, but didn't respond. There was an awkward silence.

"If you'd like, I"d be happy the review the design [of Bitcoin] for you," he offered instead. "I could let you know what I think."

"Sure," I said hesitantly. "Do you need me to send you a link to the code?"

"I think I can find it," he said.

Mr. Clear sent Mr. Davis a lengthy opinion on Bitcoin's strengths and weaknesses and suggested another cryptographer who matched Mr. Nakamoto's profile, Vili Lehdonvirta, a Finnish programmer who used to make videogames and now studies virtual currencies. But when the New Yorker writer called, Mr. Lehdonvirta made a convincing denial. Which brought Mr. Davis back to Mr. Clear.

I told him that Lehdonvirta had made a convincing denial, and that every other lead I'd been working on had gone nowhere. I then took one more opportunity to question him and to explain all the reasons that I suspected his involvement. Clear responded that his work for Allied Irish Banks was brief and "of no importance." He admitted that he was a good programmer, understood cryptography and appreciated the Bitcoin design. But, he said, economics had never been a particular interest of his. "I'm not Satoshi," Clear said. "But even if I was I wouldn't tell you."

The point, Clear continued, is that Nakamoto's identity shouldn't matter ... The currency is both real and elusive, just like its founder.

"You can't kill it," Clear said, with a touch of bravado. "Bitcoin would survive a nuclear attack."

Used to be cool.

We are sad for you, New Yorker. Recall: The magazine released to the free internet an essay by Jonathan Franzen on the condition readers "like" its Facebook page. Simon Owens had the presence of mind to check how many "likes" the brand had before and after the stunt and noticed a gain of 16,000. These fans are worth anywhere from $3.60 to $136.38, Mr. Owens writes; we'd argue for the more conservative lower limit of $0.00.

Mr. Owens interviewed New Yorker spokeswoman Alexa Cassanos at the time, who said this. "We have about 200,000 fans on Facebook. Obviously we think that that number could be bigger," she said. "And we’d also like to have people ‘like’ us or engage with us who aren’t subscribers... Ultimately we’re going to try to create more fans of our page." Well Ms. Cassanos, it looks like the exercise was a success--and it didn't cost anything but dignity.