James Gleick

The Prophet Business

There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.

Bad Readers

AI chatbots have been trained on trillions of words—but all in the service of plausibility over truth.

Your Fancy-Pants Brain

“You can write down all the equations of fluid dynamics and still be surprised by a tornado.”

The Fate of Free Will

In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.

Nothing to See Here

For centuries the study of optics and the use of invisibility in science fiction have developed side by side, each inspiring the other.

Space-Age Magus

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?

The Toll of the Clock

The clocks David Rooney studies in About Time are more than measuring devices; they are instruments of power, money, and faith.

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

Simulating Democracy

Jill Lepore’s new book looks into the origins of our diet of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and clickbait.

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.