Reading news online, whether on the web, on mailing lists or using ultraefficient RSS feeds (which permit one to have an instant bird’s-eye-view of multiple sources) has become an everyday rite. It is performed as often as several times a day, for the intoxicating sensation it gives one of being ‘connected with what’s happening’. But the [incredibly fast] production and publication times make the consumption of such information an unrestrained, bulimic process, often leading to an informational hangover from which it’s difficult to recover. Playing with these concepts is News Reader, a program that transforms a news item into a related text. Headlines are drawn from Yahoo! News, and viewing the body of a news item reveals a text with some hyperlinked terms. The links lead not to a deeper analysis of the term or to a related site, but to a new window where we find a text generated by statistical models and drawn from the alternative news source ‘Common Dreams’. The imperceptible transfer from the original text to one generated from fragments fuses concepts, giving them a more precise overall meaning. The software was written by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (author [feminine; Noah, you might want to correct them on this!] of The New Media Reader and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game), David Durand, Brion Moss and Elaine Froehlich, and is part of a set of two pieces of software, both of which apply a political approach to the distribution and reproduction of texts. (The other program is called Regime Change.) Interlinking concepts in News Reader, through logical associations but with a different emphasis than they have in the original, successfully accomplishes a double purpose: to shift the univocal and ascetic point of view of the larger news sources, and to explore their writing from a linguistic perspective. The result is fascinating, but the best and most peculiar feature [of this approach] is in the mechanical invention of credible results, at times downright entertaining or visibly dramatic, taking advantage of the patterns of language generation (?) to illuminate us about its unconscious perception.