Far Less Attention

In his 1999 book, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael Hiltzik said that “a certain quality [was] possessed by [the Palo Alto Research Center] in its extraordinary early years”: Magic. And it was the source of multiple seminal technologies including the laser printer, Ethernet and object-oriented programming. Malcolm

An Extra Life

Since the mid-1700s, advances that were initiated by scientists and accompanied by new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions—namely, vaccines, germ theory, and antibiotics—have combined to double the average human lifespan, essentially giving humanity, according to Steven Johnson, “an extra life.” In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner created the