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Twitter Postscript: Earthquake!

August 23, 2011

Sitting at one’s desk in New York, one feels a tremor. Dreaming? Naturally one turns to cyberspace. The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting an earthquake just moments ago, but it’s in Virginia. That’s 300 miles from here—impossible. Or is it? The real-time seismograph from the Lamont-Doherty observatory is not responding. That in itself seems like […]

How Google Dominates Us

August 20, 2011

How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information economy has not been well understood. The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.

Touching History: Addendum

July 17, 2011

In a little essay in The Times (which you can read here or there) I muse about the differences between the artifacts of history—the tangible, venerable manuscripts and notebooks and other touchstones—and their new digital counterparts. I try to push back against what I see as a little bit of sentimentalizing. But nothing I say—and […]

And then there were eight

July 13, 2011

Hello, Pluto! But are you a planet? (What I wrote in 2011.)

Staying in Sync with the Cosmos

June 29, 2011

I wrote this about the leap second 20 years ago. Eventually it led to Faster.
I am in the Directorate of Time. Naturally I am running late ...

When You Can’t Find the Perfect Quotation

June 27, 2011

I’m reading some Edgar Allan Poe tales in anticipation of an outdoor discussion tomorrow in Bryant Park, and I am charmed to discover (in the helpful endnotes) his habit of making up epigraphs. Or at least no one seems to be able to find his sources. Maybe they just didn’t have Google. I’m a sucker […]

Message in an Interstellar Bottle

June 21, 2011

The Voyager spacecraft have been in the news lately, because their thirty-year journey has now taken them to something very like the edge of the Solar System. Of course, that’s something of an arbitrary boundary. It’s partly a matter of human-centered definition; and it has varied, too, because the Voyagers keep making new discoveries.Voyager 1 […]

Gone Obsolete: Your Mother’s Maiden Name

June 10, 2011

[quote]Who’s there? Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Long live the King.[/quote] The business of challenge-response authentication used to be easier. They had swords; we have cryptography. Who’s better off? We have passwords, which must never be simple enough to remember and must not be written down on a slip of paper in our […]

Contact

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

Mastodon

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

Or send a private message.