Techs on Texts

Matt Price – technology historian and dedicated educator – joins us to discuss Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. We talk about egos, ego death, cults, academia, Christianity, Buddhism, and psychedelics. No …

Noah Iliinsky – most-esteemed information visualization expert, speaker and author – joins us to discuss Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang. We talk about what matters, heavy furniture, sensibl…

Daniel X. O'Neil, the worldwide entertainment juggernaut of the 21st century, joins us to discuss T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. You will learn almost nothing about The Waste Land from this discussion,…

Alex Merose extols the virtues of lazy action and calls on us to embrace Duchamp into our hearts through discussion of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Maurizio Lazzarato's essay "Marcel D…

Johnny Rodgers, my friend from Tumblr (among other things), joins us to discuss Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. We explore how Alexander's design philosophy has endured and influenced not…

I had the pleasure of recording this on-site with George in his Bellingham workshop (a former tavern). I experimented with having Claude write shownotes for this episode, and it proposed this as a "k…

Keith Garrett, coy technologist, father, and former marine, comes on to discuss Ted Chiang's masterful "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling." We talk about the benefits of forgetfulness, the limi…

Gina Trapani, exemplary human and champion of good things on the web, comes on to talk about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. We talk about creating universes, friendship, par…

Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, joins me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's masterful 1974 film, The Conversation. Nathan…

Mark Coatney, long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what …

Esther Dyson, whose bio defies summarization (and who happens to be sister of previous guest George Dyson), discusses Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze's Her. We discuss the substance…

Jordan Tigani, duck herder and renowned "database person," gives us the gift of "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about about the potential of language, the limi…

• Buy Night Flight
• Buy The Little Prince
• Listen to Minds Behind Maps
• Look at the glorious website for GDAL (the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library). It's perfect!
• "The Little Prince becomes world's most t…

A few notes and links:

• Buy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions
• "The Zahir" PDF
• "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected…

George Dyson, historian, boat maker, master human technologist, and friend of friends discusses the totally wild The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, which Dyson read when it was given to him by…

Chris Beddow, mapmaker, voyager, philosopher, and very good skier uses Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" and Umberto Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"…

Sean Gorman, geospatial entrepreneur extraordinaire, uses Dune to explain security policy, geopolitics, capitalism, sustainability, common knowledge, the erosion of common knowledge, the importance o…

Jason Goldman, one of the world's foremost Dune podcast pioneers (listen to Escape Hatch!), talks about all of the Dune books, all of the Dune movies, the Dune TV shows, democracy, institutions, the …

I've listened to this episode countless times as I've edited it and it is such a gift. I'm really grateful to Tim for doing it with me.

A few notes and links:

• Frank Herbert, by Tim O'Reilly
• Many of the…