James Gleick’s last book was Time Travel. His next book, coming in November, is The Telephone: A New History.
What was the "most characteristic feature of the thought" of the early 20th century?
Ben Lerner's appreciation for "Chris Marker, whose name was not 'Chris Marker' ... "
[First published in The New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995, under the headline “This Is Sex?”A version of this essay appears in What Just Happened.] AT FIRST GLANCE, THERE’S a lot of sex on the Internet. Or, not at first glance—nobody can find anything on the Internet at first glance. But if you have time on your hands, if you’re comfortable with computing, and if you...
Removing doubts about the meaning of time is an ambitious goal, but not too ambitious for the Queen and Parliament of Britain in 1880. They enacted the "Statutes (Definition of Time) Act" to settle the matter once and for all. So now we know. Or do we?
"Ghosts were seen when, for reasons unknown, they inadvertently slipped from their allotted time into the present."
What is MagnaCarta worth? Exactly $21,321,000. We know because that’s what it fetched in a fair public auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Twenty-one million is, by far, the most ever paid for a page of text, and therein lies a paradox: Information is now cheaper than ever and also more expensive. Mostly, of course, information is practically free, easier to store and faster to spread than our...