Archives and Anachronisms

Remembering the Future

March 26, 2024

What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. It’s all just the space-time continuum. “So in the future, the sister of the past,” thinks young Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Twisty! What if you received knowledge of your own tragic future—as a gift, or perhaps a curse?

Hawking Stephen Hawking

December 20, 2020

Stephen Hawking surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, made himself into a commercial product and an international brand. The celebrity eclipsed the scientist. There’s a scientific story to tell, and most of Hawking’s later life served to conceal it.

Time for Earth Time

November 05, 2016

The time has come to deep-six not just Daylight Saving Time but the whole jury-rigged scheme of time zones that has ruled the world’s clocks for the last century and a half.

Let Twitter Be Twitter

April 12, 2016

These people threaten to destroy one of the internet’s nicest things. Twitter is a happy accident, a fortuity, a quirk.

Leaderless Internet Hive Brain?

December 28, 2014

A look at the organization, or movement, or “shadowy, snide international collective of hackers and online activists” known as Anonymous.

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 […]

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 […]

Wikipedia’s Women Problem (2013)

April 29, 2013

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with […]

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