James Gleick

Simulating Democracy

Jill Lepore’s ‘If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future’

Moon Fever

The fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing has produced a bounty of books, films, and exhibitions.

Matters of Tolerance

‘The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World’ by Simon Winchester

Inventing Future Man

Hugo Gernsback is sometimes called the father of science fiction, though not because of any he wrote himself.⁠

When They Came from Another World

What if the future is as real as the past?

The Brave New Library

Is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold?

Bot or Not?

Increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human. Or worse, do pretend, when they are actually bots. The scary thing is how easily we can be fooled.

Today’s Dead End Kids

My Carcass and Myself

What if a person could survive past his bodily death, to be reconstituted in another form? That is the question Marcel Theroux explores in his new novel, Strange Bodies.

Time Regained!

Lee Smolin’s ‘Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe’

Wikipedia’s Women Problem

Hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the Wikipedia category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Who’s responsible?

Librarians of the Twitterverse

The Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire corpus of all public tweets. But effectively searching this mass of unstructured data, this barnyard of straw, will be more difficult than people may think.

How Google Dominates Us

Our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.

The Information Palace

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.

‘If Shakespeare Had Been Able to Google…’