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What makes what? Help, please.
Samuel Butler said (1877), A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. I have quite a bit to say about this in The Information. The subject, as you might guess, is genes. And then memes. There have been some witty variations on this theme. One of my personal favorites is Daniel Dennett’s […]
MoreThe word “information” has grown urgent and problematic—a signpost seen everywhere, freighted with new meaning and import. We hardly need the lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell us that, but after all, this is what they live for. It is a word, they tell us, “exhibiting significant linguistic productivity,” a word that “both reflects and […]
MoreThe Humiliation of Mr. Martin
An important lesson of l’Affaire Steve Martin bears mentioning, I think. (In case you haven’t followed it, his on-stage conversation with Deborah Solomon at the 92nd Street Y, largely about the world of art, as depicted in his new novel, An Object of Beauty, was interrupted in real time by a staffer with a note […]
MoreWhat Wikileaks Tells Us
Perhaps you don’t quite know what to make of the latest Wikileaks data dump. That’s all right. No one does. It’s TMI. This Week in Information Overload In point of fact, I don’t think it has much to tell us about its ostensible subject, American diplomacy. But it is revelatory of the Information Age as […]
MoreAn inscription by Benoit Mandelbrot
I’m working on a short piece about Benoit Mandelbrot for the Times Magazine’s year-end “Lives They Lived” issue, and I came across this curiosity in his (as he called it) “Scrapbook.” It’s an item from The Bulletin (Australian weekly magazine now, sadly, defunct) written in February 1990 by Charles Boag. The reporter, in Sydney, observed […]
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