No social network lasts forever, but even I didn't think Twitter could go down quite this quickly. It's been a wild and even more irresistably addictive couple of weeks on there, ever since Elon entered the building with his sink and proceeded to make that metaphor into action-verb reality. ...

Fifty years ago, a journalist-turned-futurist named Alvin Toffler published Future Shock, a treatise on life in the new Information Age that became one of 1970's biggest bestsellers. The book, along with Toffler's later works, earned him the admiration of tech leaders like AOL's Steve Case and...

What will we one day make of 2020? What can we make of it now? Attempts to provide on-the-spot historical analysis to inform this moment--something I and so many other historians now do on the regular--both feel urgently needed and hopelessly inadequate. Historians have stepped into the arena...

The New York City Marathon winds through all five boroughs, and the Bronx is the last one you hit. It comes around mile 20, the toughest point of the 26.2-mile distance, the “Wall” that everyone must scale to get to the finish line. The cheering crowds along First Avenue are a distant memory by...

It is April 19, six weeks into life, upended. In the last few years I often longed for a pause button on the world: a moment when everything would slow down and I could catch up, finish that piece of writing, read that book, get more sleep. Now I have that gotten that world on hold, and for awful...

A little more than a week ago, my spring to-do list was a long one. I was supposed to be in New York this past Monday. Back to Seattle. Then to Austin. The following week to Cleveland. Then DC. Then Little Rock. I was prepping my final class lectures for Winter Quarter, then was going to use UW...

“Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.” That's how Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe put it in the late 1990s, around the time I started tracing this long, strange trip myself. It's a quest full of great moments, from...

When I set out to write a history of Silicon Valley that brought politics and policy back into the story, I had little idea of how much tech policy would be in the headlines by the time I published it. When I designed a course on the U.S. presidency a few years back, little did I realize that I'd...

There are few things better than autumn on a college campus. Leaves are turning, backpacks sharp and textbooks new, students eager, excited, and (mostly) keeping up with the reading. Along with teaching on my own beautiful campus, I'll be visiting a few more campuses--as well as other kinds of...

Now is the time of year that Seattleites live for: blue skies, warm sun, water and mountains, no bugs or humidity (sorry, East Coasters). Very kindly, the publishing gods timed The Code's release so that I could wrap up book tour just as summer hits the Pacific Northwest with full force. While...