Articles 2024
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The World of Tomorrow
Works in Progress, December 2024
When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
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We Still Live in the Physical World
Review of The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen
Reason, September 10, 2024
The digital world has not effaced our humanity, no matter what social critics like Christine Rosen say.
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Libraries of Matter
Works in Progress, August 29, 2024
Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.
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Tipping culture is out of control. Trump and Harris would make it worse
Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2024
American tipping culture is poised to get even more intense. In a rare case of bipartisan agreement, presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both advocate exempting tips from federal income taxes.
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The Self-Checkout Revolution
The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2024
From cash registers to bar-code scanning to today’s self-service kiosks, technology keeps changing the relationship between retailers and customers.
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The Future of AI Is Helping Us Discover the Past
Reason, June 2024
Historical teaching and research are being revamped by AI.
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Concealed Carry: Review of Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close by Hannah Carlson
Quillette, November 17, 2023
For more than five centuries, the humble pocket has changed the way we equip ourselves to face the world. -
Elon Musk and the Value of Failure: Review of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
The Washington Free Beacon, November 12, 2023
The mammoth biography of Elon Musk is two-thirds epic romance, one-third tragedy. -
The Pioneering Scientist Who Explained Contagious Disease
The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2023
After decades of experiments in the early 19th century, Agostino Bassi showed that silkworms were being killed by a microorganism, setting the stage for modern germ theory.
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Natural, Artificial, Ethical? How Synthetic Biology Is Overturning Old Categories
Coller Venture Review, 2023
For a half century we’ve been telling ourselves a story about technology as a fall from grace, about artifice as the source of human suffering and environmental ruin – even as we consumed more and more of its products. The idealistic scientists and entrepreneurs building the new biology tell a different story, a story of life and renewal.