James Gleick (Page 4)

A Vast Confusion

December 19, 2014

“Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,” wrote Andrew Wynter in 1854. (Wynter was what we would now call a popular-science writer; in his day job he practiced medicine, specializing in “lunatics.”) “What might not […]

Why Must an Author Twit?

August 26, 2014

Howard Jacobson: "So that you can do our business for us. So that you can connect to your readers, tell them what you're writing, tell them where you're going to be speaking, tell them what you're reading, tell them what you're fucking eating."

“The Telephone Transformed—Into Practically Everything”

August 05, 2014

“I carry around one of these little boxes,” says a Motorola executive, Al Zabarsky, “and get every day, besides my personalized mail, clippings from services that clip according to your temperament, from companies that specialize in original source material—whatever you guys in the business call it.” We used to call it news, Al. It’s the […]

“You Are Old, Father Feynman”

April 06, 2014

You write a book; time passes. Toward the end of Genius I quote a bit of doggerel by “a young friend” of Richard Feynman: You are old, Father Feynman … And your hair has turned visibly grey; And yet you keep tossing ideas around— At your age, a disgraceful display! Where did I find that? I […]

Total Noise, Only Louder

March 20, 2014

Kids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there’s a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every branch, not to mention the video cameras, and we’ve entered the condition that David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami […]

“She Was a Courier in the City”

January 21, 2014

What is a bike messenger, and why? William Gibson looks at the archaic intersection of information and geography.

March of time, arrow of time, time warp

October 31, 2013

This is the kind of thing that’s buzzing through my head as I work on the next book. (It’s an N-gram, computed on the fly by Google here, from the contents of all the books they [in some cases illegally] scanned from libraries.) (Were you wondering about those “time warp” occurrences in the early 19th […]

The Zone of Uncertainty (What Pope Francis Said)

September 20, 2013

Everybody has an opinion or a summary or an interpretation of the  with Pope Francis, and this is the last place you’d come for more, but one part resonates especially powerfully for me. It’s when he talks about uncertainty and doubt. In seeking God “in all things,” he says, “there is still an area of […]

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