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The Information
A History, a Theory, a Flood
“It is one of those very rare books that provide a completely new framework for understanding the world around us. It was a privilege to read.”
Royal Society Winton Prize“So ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it.”
New York Times
“Bold and arresting”
2012 Hessell-Tiltman Prize
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The Word
- Bartlett's Updated Creating a new edition of a great book of quotations is an adventure in cultural excavation. How did the editors of Bartlett’s do?
- If Shakespeare Had Been Able to Google Regarding obsessiveness about words.
- The Death of the Book Despair and hope.
Looking Back
- Einstein A profile for the century’s end.
- What the Beep? Our electronic devices were trying to tell us something. But what, and which?
Cyberspace
- "I Agree" What rights do you give away when you blithely click that innocent-looking button?
- Accounting for Taste On-line merchants try to read our minds. If we like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, will we like 10,000 Maniacs?
- Inescapable Connected The rise of the network; the dawn of pervasive computing.
- Spam (1) The Internet’s own Black Plague, as it was in 1996.
- Spam (2) It only got worse.
Microsoft
- Chasing Bugs in the electronic village.
- Microspeak How they talked, and why.
- The Microsoft Monopoly Early (1995) reporting and analysis of the antitrust storm clouds.
Modern Marvels
- A Bug and a Crash Guess what caused the expensive crash of the Ariane 5 in 1996. And what does it say about software design?
- Maintenance Not Included Batteries and other surprises.
- Patently Absurd The disaster in progress that is the United States patent system.
One More ...
- The Doctor's Plot You don’t believe people are being abducted by aliens, do you? An example of wacky belief mania.

