No Bosses, and No Rewards

I have two personal mottoes: The first one is from a Talking Heads song, and the second one is the title of this blog because it applies to a lot of the most interesting questions: Many of the posts and favorite texts here were prompted by a book I’d read recently or been reminded of,

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

Networks of Ideas

Steven Johnson’s book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, and its companion PBS and BBC series, examined the largely unplanned roles played in our lives by: Glass—”A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress.” Cold—”Our mastery of cold is helping to reorganize settlement patterns all

The Invention of Surgery

For 1,500 years, medical practice in the Western and Arab worlds, such as it was, was dominated by the doctrines of two ancient Greeks: Hippocrates and Galen, who explained the inner workings of the body with the theory of the four humors. But in his book, The Invention of Surgery: A History of Modern Medicine:

Sutton Who?

Last month, Netflix premiered the new movie, The Dig, about the excavation at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England in 1939. I’m familiar with most of the best-known archaeological discoveries, but I’d never heard of this one. The primary discovery described by the film was an 80-foot-long ship in an earthen mound that contained ”the richest

A Commitment to Freedom

Russell Shorto, senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute, writes and talks about America’s Dutch roots. The Island at the Center of the World is his history of Dutch Manhattan, “the founding colony that shaped America.” He said that his book, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, is about a place and

Tut, Tut, Looks Like Rain

Weather forecasts have been a given for so long—in newspapers, on radio and television, on mobile devices—that it’s hard to imagine daily life without them. But “in 1800 the weather remained a mystery,” said Peter Moore. In his book, The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, Moore described how—between 1800 and

What We Value

Long considered by some to be more lucky than skilled as a general and not among the country’s best presidents, Ulysses Grant’s legacy is being reassessed by many historians. Ron Chernow’s 2017 book, Grant, is one of three “major, sympathetic biographies of Grant [that] have been published…since 2012,” according to Marty Schladen of The Columbus

An Isolated Genius

In 1913, Cambridge University mathematician G. H. Hardy received a letter from India that contained a number of unusual theorems. A day spent reviewing them left Hardy bewildered. He later wrote, “I had never seen anything in the least like them before,” according to Robert Kanigel. Kanigel’s book, The Man Who Knew Infinity, was the