Marsalis later recalled, I don’t care much about computers, and kept telling him so, but he goes on for two hours. He was a man possessed. After a while, I started looking at him and not the computer,...
Many people who celebrate the arts and the humanities, who applaud vigorously the tributes to their importance in our schools, will proclaim without shame (and sometimes even joke) that they don’t und...
Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought, Wiener wrote. This is not the case.14 The more powerful the computer, the...
Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him.
Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the r...
Like most artist-craftsmen of his era, he did not sign his work.
Leonardo was not content merely to measure every aspect of every body part. In addition, he felt compelled to record what occurs when each of these parts moves.
Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonard...
Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne pai...
Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace, Vasari said of hi...
Las personas lo suficientemente locas como para pensar que pueden cambiar el mundo son las que lo cambian.
La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendrá de lo bien que se enseñe en sus escuelas la multiplicación y las tablas periódicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginación y la creativid...
Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. When I hear that kind of thing, he responded, it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it my...
Jobs’s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingraine...
Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year, rather than the three that it was offered. For one of his projects, he made a device with a photocell that would switch on a circuit when exposed to light...
Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him, Cook said. That allows him to focus on a few thin...
Jobs and his team went to a Xerox dealer to look at the Star as soon as it was released. But he deemed it so worthless that he told his colleagues they couldn’t spend the money to buy one. We were ver...
Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a simple partnership r...
Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. Steve got into it even more than I did, said Kottke. He was living off Roman Meal cereal. They would go shopping at a farmers’ co...
I’m deeply grateful to John and Ann Doerr, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Leon Wieseltier, and Ken Auletta, all of whom provided invaluable support along the way. Alice Mayhew, who has been my editor a...