The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected...
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 networks;...
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic fa...
Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one ano...
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.
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...
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but button...
A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial v...
Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver ba...
Today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.
Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and c...
The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety...
And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from or...
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.
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...
Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning disks for the eyes. Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called lenses.
One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; emb...
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.
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