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...
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 it exists in 2010—the new rules and the old rules in collision. The great newspapers with first...
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 “a big well...
I’m not sure yet. Perhaps I’m blogging. I’ve had a web site here, a “home page,” since the dawn of time. (By “dawn of time” I mean of course the early 1990s. Do I have to defend that? The starting line of history varies for different media. [By “medium” I mean communications channel.] Different media have different event horizons. If...
In New York, for a short time only, a beautiful exhibition devoted to the birth of mathematics on cuneiform tablets in ancient Babylon, a millennium before the Greeks. I touch on this story in The Information: how this first mathematical flowering vanished into the sands, only to be rediscovered in modern times. The pioneering scholar Otto Neugebauer said in 1949: Our task can properly be...
I know what you’re wondering, and no, Faster is not based on my book, and I was not consulted. This should have been a dead giveaway:
I am in Dear Book Lover. (The question, not the answer.)
James Gleick’s is the author, most recently, of the Time Travel: A History. His previous book was The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, an international bestseller exploring the genesis and consequences of the information age. It won the Royal Society’s Winton award for science and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman award for history. Gleick was born in […]