Brian Knappenberger's Kickstarter-funded documentary The Internet's Own Boy, the director's attempt to unite fractured accounts of the late Aaron Swartz as a person and an activist into a single narrative, just debuted at Sundance to positive reviews.

Over the weekend, the Boston Globe published what it calls "the inside story" of MIT's role in the federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Title notwithstanding, it misses the real story here entirely: why exactly did the Department of Justice go after Swartz so aggressively?

Both the New Yorker and The Atlantic published long stories about the late 26-year-old computer whiz Aaron Swartz today. These join lengthy profiles from New York, Rolling Stone, Slate, The Verge and The New Republic. This overwhelming outpouring is not a surprise: The suicide of a 26-year-old computer genius is the kind of story magazines were made to cover: complex but instantly engaging, offering a window into an unusual world.

Aaron Swartz, a programmer and Internet activist who co-founded a company that would eventually grow into Reddit, committed suicide Friday in New York City, according to The Tech and Boing Boing. Swartz's attorney confirmed the news to The Tech early Saturday morning.

Fired Reddit cofounder and noted nontrepreneur Aaron Swartz says developers shouldn't roll out software with a Hollywood-style launch, as the rock-star coders at collaboration-software makers 37 Signals say. Swartz favors "the Gmail Launch," he writes on his blog, Raw Thought. The gist of his argument, below.

Reddit founder and teenage RSS co-developer Aaron Swartz has been posting chapters to Bubble City, a novel in progress. The guy's no Gore Vidal, but with today even slower than Christmas on the Internet, an 11-chapter serial about corrupt startups and an eeeeevil Google may be just what you need to kick back with until Cory Doctorow's next dispatch.
(Photo by Jacob Applebaum)

THE GALLERY LOUNGE, SOMA — Joel Sacks of AdBrite wants to have a word with me. No, nothing to do with his company's adventures in serving up porn ads; he's still pissed off about the time we caught him on video soaking himself with a pint of beer. This time, he's dry. But he's just lucky — this San Francisco bar is packed wall to wall, thanks to social-news site Reddit's open invitation for anyone to come and spill a free beer on their neighbor. The largesse comes from Reddit's owner, Conde Nast, the publisher of Wired, which bought the site a year ago. I got to meet Reddit's founders, most of whom are still, contrary to rumor, at the company. But one was, notably, missing in action: Aaron Swartz, the obstreperous Reddit cofounder who quit shortly after Conde Nast bought the site. More on the founders' status after the jump.

NICK DOUGLAS — The serial entrepreneur is dead, and thank god, because he bored me. The new archetypal business creator is not that interested in business at all. Unlike Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page with their single grand vision, or the mercenary team who built Myspace for the money, founding a company is just one way the nontrepreneur fulfills a desire to improve the world. I'll show you how nontrepreneurs happen to start fantastic companies, how their approach to business is so special, and how they quit without any sense of loss. And I'll do it by using the rather unfair example of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.