James Gleick

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August 01, 1954 in The United States

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http://www.around.com/

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James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguish...more James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )(less)

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For the Annals of Recursion.

1. In The Information (pages 408–409, for those who wish to follow along) I mention a poet named Thomas Freeman, who lived from approximately 1590 to 1630. I say he is “utterly forgotten” and add that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.

I would never have heard of Thomas Freeman myself, if Anthony Lane hadn’t happened to discover him in the course of reviewing Sir...

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Books by James Gleick

Average rating: 3.96 · 12,122 ratings · 1,032 reviews · 15 distinct works

	Chaos: The Making of a New Science 3.95 avg rating — 5,322 ratings — published 1987 — 27 editions	My rating:
	Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman 4.18 avg rating — 2,551 ratings — published 1992 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood 3.94 avg rating — 2,277 ratings — published 2011 — 20 editions	My rating:
	Isaac Newton 3.72 avg rating — 875 ratings — published 2003 — 15 editions	My rating:
	Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything 3.46 avg rating — 571 ratings — published 1999 — 20 editions	My rating:
	The Best American Science Writing 2000 by James Gleick (Editor), Jesse Cohen (Series Editor) 3.98 avg rating — 46 ratings — published 2000 — 4 editions	My rating:
	What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier 3.17 avg rating — 59 ratings — 5 editions	My rating:
	Chaos: Making a New Science 4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 2011	My rating:
	Nature's Chaos 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 1990 — 8 editions	My rating:
	Caos. La creación de una ciencia 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	My rating:

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Quotes by James Gleick

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

12 people liked it

“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”
― James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

7 people liked it

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

tags: to-think-about

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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Bookish: 01April11	11	35	Apr 01, 2011 12:39pm
Science and Inquiry: May 2011 - The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood	85	109	Aug 14, 2011 05:37am
The History Book ...: HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY	31	77	Oct 06, 2011 08:30pm
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Mid-Continent Pub...: Publishers Weekly Best Books 2011	5	9	Nov 17, 2011 09:03am
The History Book ...: BECKY'S 50 BOOKS READ IN 2011	106	108	Dec 10, 2011 09:23pm
The History Book ...: SCIENCE	41	21	Apr 21, 2012 09:02pm

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