The very first piece in What Just Happened, a collection of James Gleick's journalism just published by Pantheon, forcefully reminds us how much has changed over the past 10 years. When his description of the abundant bugs in Microsoft's brand-new Word for Windows was published in 1992, Gleick had to explain to the New York Times's readers what software bugs were and how he and other aggrieved consumers accessed a forum on CompuServe ("a vast electronic network that subscribers can dial into via modem") to complain about them.
Although by that time Gleick had already done a two-year stint as the Times's official science reporter and written a surprise bestseller (Chaos: The Making of a New Science) as well as a biography of physicist Richard Feynman (Genius), the digital world was uncharted territory for him, too. As he cheerfully acknowledges in the introduction to his new book, he got some things "deliriously wrong": a 1994 article predicted that commercial online services like America Online would wither away, and in 1995 he declared that the Internet was not a particularly good medium for pornography.
"I thought some of the fun of this would lie in stuff that we didn't know 10 years ago," the author says in the West Side apartment that serves as a pied-à-terre when he's away from his Hudson Valley home. "I'm not embarrassed about the stuff that's out of date; it's fun, and I hope it casts light on how quickly things change. I didn't revise anything to make myself look right, but I'm also proud of the things I did get right."
"Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism," for example, focused on the company's monopolistic tendencies at a time—1995—when "people generally thought that Microsoft was successful because it was smart and scrappy and innovative. They had not focused on the ways in which Microsoft accumulated and wielded power that had nothing to do with the quality of its products but with understanding and using the gears and levers of the economy of computers." Gleick thinks "the findings of fact were correct" in the Microsoft antitrust case, but notes, "The computer industry moves so quickly that by the time the judicial system catches up with last year's crimes, it's time to apply the lessons and remedies to next year's crime."
"This is a running theme in the book," Gleick continues. "What should the government do? I think it's clear that you can't trust companies to protect individual privacy, for example, but although I think the government should do something, I have to confess that I don't know what, and the idea makes me nervous."
Such thorny issues were far in the future when Gleick was a Harvard undergraduate (class of 1976) paying more attention to his articles for the Crimson than to his studies as an English major. "I wasn't thinking about science then, I just liked journalism," he recalls. He began writing science pieces for the Times Sunday magazine because "as a kid on the metro desk I couldn't go to them and say, 'I'd like to write a big piece about Middle Eastern politics'; they had plenty of people who knew about that. But I could go to them and say, 'I want to write about this new thing called chaos theory,' and they would say, 'Okay.' "
Chaos grew from two of those articles. Gleick wrote the manuscript fast because "I had a finite leave of absence [from the Times] and a small advance [from Viking editor Dan Frank]." The author was perhaps the only person who wasn't surprised when his portrait of a relatively obscure scientific field became a bestseller. "I think people were interested in chaos theory for the same reasons I was. Here was this really exciting story involving human beings in the world of science, and what they were learning was showing us something about our world that changed the way we looked at things."
Gleick followed Frank to Pantheon ("Dan's a great editor, and I'm a huge fan") for Genius. "The challenge was that Feynman's great work in the field of quantum electrodynamics, unlike chaos theory, hasn't got anything to tell nonscientists about the world we live in every day. I had to think hard about why I believed that he had something to tell us, and decided that he was telling us something about what knowledge is in the modern world. Feynman thought about the most profound question of all: does the universe have a purpose, or if it's just anarchy and uncertainty, can we live with that? "
The same desire to convey an individual life's broader meaning animates Gleick's current project, a biography of Isaac Newton for the Penguin Lives series. "We don't know much about Newton as a human being, so to make the book work I really have to tell the story of what his ideas mean for our understanding of our world. Luckily, that's a lot: more than we realize, day in and day out, of the way we view the world traces back to Newton, and to make that clear I'm going to have to describe a world that changed in his lifetime."
From 17th-century physics to the rise of the Internet, it's the changes science and technology have wrought on our world that have always fascinated Gleick, who once declared that he didn't think of himself as a science writer. "Oh, don't believe anything I say on the subject of what kind of writer I am!" he says, laughing. Like most reporters, he prefers to let the big picture emerge from the details.
