I am listening in on the Key West Literary Seminar. This year’s topic: The Hungry Muse, all about food in literature. Poets and gourmands are waxing eloquent, and mouths are watering, and perversely it has all put me in mind of some culinary prose from W. H. Auden, reporting from Iceland in 1936: For the curious there are two Icelandic foods which should certainly be tried. One is Hákarl...
There are not enough names to go around. This is a fact about our crowded, information-rich world that should be clear enough by now. I spend a certain amount of time exploring it in The Information—not enough names, catchphrases, abbreviations, or for that matter book titles (apologies again to Martin Amis). We’re supposed to be sophisticated about namespaces by now. But our legal system...
My farewell essay about Benoit Mandelbrot appears this weekend in the Times Magazine’s year-end issue, The Lives They Lived. It’s here: “Fractal Vision.”
A few years ago I was involved in the secret negotiations with Google over the lawsuit by authors who objected to the company’s unauthorized copying of our books onto their servers. (We reached a good settlement, pleasing all sides, but there have been some objections, and court approval remains in doubt.) As everyone recognized, Google was compiling a database that amounted to the holy grail:...
I’m working with Open Road (what a talented bunch!) to produce a long overdue e-book of Chaos. It’s going to have what seems to be called in the biz “enhanced content”—which is to say, videos, animations, graphics in motion. Pendulums will swing and strange attractors will attract. Yet it will still be a book. I think it will be done in March.
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 (1995): A scholar is a library’s way of making another library. Dear reader, can you...
The 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 embodies major cultural and...
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 saying, “Discuss Steve’s career.” Afterward, to compound the insult, the organizers...