James Gleick
Books, Occasional Writing, and Other Outbursts
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Latest posts
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The Telephone: A New History
The telephone burst onto the world stage 150 years ago and began to transform every part of life: from business to warfare, from news gathering to sex work. James Gleick shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.
- Books
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About
James Gleick’s last book was Time Travel. His next book, coming in November, is The Telephone: A New History. He was born in New York City in 1954. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he…
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How the Web Was Lost
The internet was not meant to suck. Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and the industrial-scale harvest of user data.”The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states. The creation of a…
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The Parrot in the Machine
The artificial intelligence industry depends on plagiarism, mimicry, and exploited labor, not intelligence.
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The Case for Free Will
Some physicists and philosophers have convinced themselves that free will is an illusion—that we are nothing but particles moving this way and that, "fully dictated by mathematical decree." Don't let them convince you. Free will is real; it is our essential, defining quality,…
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Too Good to Be True
The chatbots have read practically everything, and they still can’t be trusted. ichard Powers’s new novel, Playground, features an artificial intelligence resembling the new generation of “large language models,” like ChatGPT and Gemini. At one point a character grumbles: “You…
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Remembering the Future
What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. It’s all just the space-time continuum. “So in the future, the sister of the past,” thinks young Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection…
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Twitter, We Hardly Knew Ye
With the entity formerly known as Twitter vanishing in the rearview mirror, here are two articles from the early days, when we wondered what it was and what it might become. A global conversation? A mosaic of communities and interests? Perhaps you remember.
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Now You See Me, Now You Don’t
If you could choose one superpower—to fly, or to be invisible—which would you pick? If you were invisible, what would you do? Dreams of invisibility in a world of ubiquitous surveillance.