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...
Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
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...
In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.
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...
The technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrat...
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want...
But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. Although queen is a term that reminds us of human...
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.
Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits o...
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...
That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.
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...
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.
If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,
Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
Showing 41 to 60 of 133 results