Before an agreement was brokered Friday, the standoff in Kiev between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s government and the loose coalition of anti-government forces was bloody and telegenic. Bob examines what those gripping images tell us, and what they don't. 

The Oscar-nominated documentary “The Square” turns a lens on the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath through the eyes of three very different men whose lives intersected in Tahrir Square in 2011. Brooke talks with director Jehane Noujaim and producer Karim Amer about capturing Egypt’s unfolding narrative on camera. Audio courtesy of the Paley Center for Media.

Historical understanding doesn’t always move ahead. Sometimes it slips backwards. Case in point: In 2012, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of official US involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon quietly launched VietnamWar50th.com. Bob talks to historian Nick Turse, the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, who noticed that the website’s version of the war seems stuck in the past, reasserting misinformation long since debunked by journalists, historians, and the government’s own Pentagon papers.

The proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable could do more than mess with our TV and Internet bills. It could shape how many of us experience the flow of ideas. Brooke talks with communications law scholar Susan P. Crawford about the potential impact of this mega-merger on the information we access through Comcast's digital pipe. 

All across the country, communities are fighting to build their own broadband internet networks as an alternative to the services offered by big cable companies. However, these efforts have often been thwarted by legislation lobbied for by, you guessed it, the cable companies. Bob talks with James Baller, president of the Baller Herbst Law group, who has long been leading the legal charge on behalf of municipalities.

Cake - Fashion Nugget

A rash of state laws considered or passed in 2013 seek to rein in drone surveillance. They offer a patchwork of restrictions that seem to reflect the particular culture, or business interests, of individual states. Bob talks with Margot Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project and a lecturer at Yale Law School, who has surveyed the legal landscape and noticed a trend.

On September 11th, 2012, gunmen attacked two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans. Sean Smith, one of the four killed in the attack, was an IT manager in the real world, but online, he was Vile Rat, a hugely influential diplomat in the video game Eve Online. OTM Producer and TLDR co-creator Alex Goldman talks to Sean's friend Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco about who Sean was both in Eve and in the real world.

Programming note: This segment originally aired on TLDR, OTM's new blog and podcast.