Old Is The New New

I’m enjoying Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and already thinking about which chunks I will cannibalize for my history of science and technology class next semester. Good Ideas brings together themes that Johnson has been developing for years: the networked nature of innovation, the ingenuity of cities, the power of thinking across disciplines and scales. It’s [...]

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Métis grooviness, hard working brackets, and my beef with John Ralston Saul’s “A Fair Country.”

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Alec Guinness on Star Wars, The Simpsons, syphilis, and Marlene Dietrich’s alien lover.

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As soon as I said, “But nobody can name the inventor of television,” the class shouted in unison: “Philo!”

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Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the huckster visionary whose mail-order superhighway paved the way for civil rights, feminism, the sexual revolution and the information age. Also, he may have been murdered by the FBI.

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Excerpt from Benjamin Nugent’s new book of the same name. If you date a writer/star of The Office are you still really a nerd?

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Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives, online free from the Hoover Institution (who are eager to get the word out, I guess, that the Soviet Union was bad).

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You’ve got to admit, that’s a great title for a book about the economics of pirates.

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Tom Englehardt posts Chalmers Johnson’s review of Alex Abella’s new history of RAND.

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You heard it here first:* Moby Dick is awesome! (*No, you didn’t.)

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