Annals of Internet Porn: 1995
[First published in The New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995, under the headline “This Is Sex?”A version of this essay appears in What Just Happened.] AT FIRST GLANCE, THERE’S a lot of sex on the...
View ArticleRemembering “Chris Marker”
Ben Lerner offers a beautiful tribute in the Paris Review to the creator of La jetée, the movie—or “photo-novel”—that serves as my touchstone in Chapter Ten of Time Travel (The Paradoxes). Lerner...
View ArticleThe Discovery of Time
Twenty-five years after the publication of H. G. Wells’s first book, The Time Machine, the “new realist” philosopher Samuel Alexander said this: If I were asked to name the most characteristic feature...
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Time for Earth Time
[First published in slightly different form in The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2016] We awaken to yet another disturbance in the chronosphere — our twice-yearly jolt from resetting the clocks, mechanical...
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Oop: Time Travelers Missing from My Book Time Travel
The odds that anyone’s favorite time travelers appear in the pages of Time Travel are, unfortunately, less than 100%. Perhaps much less. Some readers are already, graciously, pointing out the...
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Moon Fever
First it was a heavenly body—a beacon, or a world, a place where no one could possibly go. Then, from 1969 to 1972, twelve people landed there in spaceships. On behalf of all humanity, they said. Is...
View ArticleHawking Stephen Hawking
First published in the New York Review of Books, April 19, 2021. Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife Basic Books, 388 pp., $30.00 The world’s first...
View ArticleNow You See Me, Now You Don’t
Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen by Gregory J. Gbur Yale University Press, 280 pp., $30.00 Transparency: The Material History of an Idea by Daniel Jütte Yale University...
View ArticleTwitter, We Hardly Knew Ye
It took so little time for Elon Musk to obliterate Twitter and create a place of hatred and horror. He turned something valuable into a megaphone for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites,...
View ArticleFree Will—Yea or Nay?
A neuroscientist and geneticist sets out to rescue the beleaguered concept from its many deniers—including some famous physicists. (Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will,...
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