Posts (Page 4)

Addendum: Libraries, Scholars, Words

April 15, 2013

In discussing memes in The Information, I quoted Daniel Dennett’s clever remark that a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library. If I had read Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald’s great and final novel, I would have added this:   It struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed […]

Taking Daylight Saving Time to Extremes

March 08, 2013

This is the weekend when the clocks do something—spring forward, it must be—and from now on Daylight Saving Time will always remind me of Marcel Aymé, born 111 years ago this month, a writer of “fantastic” stories, not much translated into English. I stumbled onto Aymé not via Twitter nor word of mouth nor any […]

P.S. re preserving our species memory

January 19, 2013

Having jotted the below item on Twitter and the Library of Congress, I belatedly rediscovered the following. Too easy to forget these things. From the wise and foresighted Steve Martin, 2008: [quote]I have learned that people are uploading their lives into cyberspace and am convinced that one day all human knowledge and memory will exist […]

The Twitterverse Goes to the Library

January 16, 2013

[also at the NYR Blog] “What food for speculation each person affords, as he writes his hurried epistle, dictated either by fear, or greed, or more powerful love!” —Andrew Wynter (1854)     For a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) […]

Ada’s Birthday

December 10, 2012

Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, was born 197 years ago, 10 December 1815, so it’s safe to say that many bicentennial preparations are already getting under way. What an unusual sort of celebrity she has become, after nearly two centuries of total obscurity. Let us remember: she was forgotten. Today she is the Google […]

Autocorrect, Unexpurgated

August 05, 2012

Even misspelled, a certain word may not appear in The New York Times. So for those who cannot live without @scarthomas, the full version of my Autocorrect piece is here.

Harald Bluetooth? Really?

June 03, 2012

I wrote this—Inescapably Connected—eleven years ago. There was no such thing as “iPhone.” Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were barely coming into view. The “Network” was rising all around. We sipped information through straws that were about to become wormholes. Some of it has come true.

Meta Enough for You?

May 11, 2012

For the Annals of Recursion. 1. In The Information (pages 408–409, for those who wish to follow along) I mention a poet named Thomas Freeman, who lived from approximately 1590 to 1630. I say he is “utterly forgotten” and add that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. I would never have heard of Thomas […]

Contact

Find me in the open social web (fediverse; Mastodon): @gleick@mas.to

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Literary agent:
Michael Carlisle
at Inkwell Management,
521 Fifth Ave.,
New York 10175.

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