Latest (Page 5)

Touching History

I got a thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm version. […]

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Touching History: Addendum

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 […]

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And then there were eight

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

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Staying in Sync with the Cosmos

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 ...

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When You Can’t Find the Perfect Quotation

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 […]

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Message in an Interstellar Bottle

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

[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 […]

In an Appliance Store, 1960

[quote]We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographic and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of experience.[/quote] Marshall McLuhan wrote that on the first page of his first great book, […]

This Is Predation

I’m a fairly heavy customer of Amazon.com (among other booksellers), and I even provide links on this site for people who want to buy my books there (or elsewhere). So I have nothing against Amazon per se. Last night an old half-forgotten book popped into my head, and I wanted to check its availability, so […]

Remind me: how dead is the Book again?

I’m meant to give a talk in Sydney called Perish the Thought, about the death (and/or resurrection) of the book, so I’ve been studying. Here’s a lovely eighty-year-old fragment of poetry on the subject, by one Bob Brown. It comes from his self-published book Words (1931). It’s a confident prediction of what lies ahead: Nineteen-fifty has come […]

Glimpse of the Past

I just found this photograph on my hard drive. I don’t know where it came from; I have no memory of seeing it before. It is a low-resolution image, grainy and shadowed. Three men on a bench: one wearing a suit and tie (you can almost make out the time on his wristwatch); one slouching […]

Your Whereabouts, Revealed

A couple of British software engineers have just discovered that your iPhone (if, you know, you happen to have one) keeps a permanent detailed record of your movements. Whenever you sync your phone with a computer, the record goes there, too. They’ve written some quick and dirty software to demonstrate. In a matter of seconds, […]

Where Are They Now: Bell Labs

[pullquote align=”right”] Claude Shannon’s managers were willing to leave him alone, even though they did not understand exactly what he was working on. AT&T at mid-century did not demand instant gratification from its research division. It allowed detours into mathematics or astrophysics with no apparent purpose. —The Information[/pullquote] Information theory was born at Bell Labs; […]

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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