The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice’s lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans’ lead—at least so far—and just move to...
The time travelers are usually adapt at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole...
The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that mass behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.
In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as...
Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disea...
An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence. We’re blind to our blindness.
A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities—capturing information about group behavior, and s...
2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of...
If your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely don...
For a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid netwo...
Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.
Innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an idea-space: a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.
Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world’s population today is made up of descendant...
If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at nig...
What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef’s survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outsid...
The timing of Thomas Lewis’ illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood’s smal...
The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.