This site is home for some reporting and essays that may be hard to find elsewhere. For example, here is an article about cyberspace transforming the Oxford English Dictionary (and the language). It was written for the New York Times Magazine, as was this: Get Out of My Namespace — how, in our crowded world, we're encountering a radical increase in collisions over names, along with possessiveness and confusion.

All this writing is more or less as it appeared in print, so maybe some of it already seems quaint. Some of it makes up a book, What Just Happened.

My first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, is being released in a new 20th-anniversary edition. I have some further thoughts and wrote an afterword.

The next book will be about information, information theory, the history of information ... details to come. If that makes sense, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Biographical Facts

Photo: Phyllis Rose

Author, reporter, and essayist, James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. He attended Harvard College and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times.

His first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. He collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software.

In 1989-90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. For some years he wrote the Fast Forward column in the New York Times Magazine.

With Uday Ivatury, he founded The Pipeline, a pioneering New York City-based Internet service in 1993, and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 1995. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series. He is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

Books

Isaac Newton (Pantheon, 2003). A masterpiece of brevity and concentration. Isaac Newton sees its angular subject in the round, presenting him as scientist and magician, believer and heretic, monster and man.... It will surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come. Fortunate Newton! —John Banville, The Guardian

What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (Pantheon, 2002). A marvellous journey around our technology-drenched world.... The work of a master. —The Independent

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon, 1999). In years to come Faster will tell people what we were like as clearly as Dickens or Tom Wolfe. —Patricia Volk, The New York Times.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon, 1992). A rare, jewel-like biography... terrifically readable. It achieves an almost perfect balance between the physicist's work and his life... Gleick is a consummate craftsman. —Washington Post Book World.

Chaos: Making a New Science Twentieth-anniversary edition (Penguin, 2008). An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone had just found the light switch. —Douglas Adams.