If you sometimes wonder, as I do, what good civilization has done for us, consider food. For most of the 300,000 years during which homo sapiens has walked on Earth, we devoted nearly all our waking hours to finding and securing food. That began to change about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. […]
Continue Reading...One of the best ways I’ve found to explore the factors that influence the grand sweep of modern history is to examine the stories of individual companies, industries, and commodities. And among the books I’ve found that have helped the most are The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed […]
Continue Reading...At first, before Henry Ford, before the twentieth century, the automobile was not a sure thing. In fact, it was a downright nuisance. For starters, they couldn’t agree on what to call it. A “road machine?” “Automotor horse?” “Buggyaut?” “Horseless carriage?” They didn’t know what fuel to use. Steam? Kerosene? Coal gas? Electricity? Maybe gasoline? […]
Continue Reading...His father was arrested for failure to disperse from a Ku Klux Klan rally. He was also investigated for profiteering by the U. S. Senate and the State of New York and sued by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations. His son-in-law’s father spent fourteen months in Federal prison for illegal campaign contributions, […]
Continue Reading...The first computer programmer was a woman. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, wrote code in 1842-43 for Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, a computer that was never built. And a century later, when the first digital computers finally came into existence, the programmers were predominantly female. In fact, women continued to dominate the field well into […]
Continue Reading...If you’re looking for an expert to confirm your fears about killer robots, the grey goo problem, or robots taking all our jobs, you’re in the wrong place. Amy Webb began her career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She has become a widely respected futurist, author, and founder of the Future Today Institute […]
Continue Reading...The Curse of Bigness highlights one of the most significant policy questions facing American society. The author, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu, insists it’s time to restore America’s lost commitment to the antitrust legislation passed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Break up big corporations, he urges, since the increasing concentration of […]
Continue Reading...Bad Blood is a cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of corporate power in Silicon Valley. It’s also vivid evidence for the invaluable role played by investigative journalists, whose work constitutes one of the few checks available in our society on corporate misbehavior. The multi-billion-dollar Theranos scandal detailed in this book is the most dramatic and best-known […]
Continue Reading...Not long ago, I reviewed Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance, and The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. My reviews are at Elon Musk wants to build a colony on Mars (for real) and The Jeff Bezos story, or why I hate Amazon.com, respectively. Both books are […]
Continue Reading...Fifty-five years ago I became a speculator on Wall Street. I was suffering through graduate school at Columbia University at the time and found it much more enjoyable to watch the ticker tape in a broker’s office rather than hang out in a library on the Columbia campus. Within a short time I graduated from […]
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