Because of the internet, humans are reading more than ever. The problem in this, according to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is that our reading has become shallower. His argument is not that the internet is full of intellectually trivial content but that the medium itself encourages shallow reading and impedes our ability…
In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick succeeds in weaving a digestible and engrossing narrative of a subject that might strike most people as hopelessly esoteric and bland—Claude Shannon’s information theory. At Bell Labs in the 1940s, Shannon was working on an efficient way to transmit messages over long distances. In the process, he transformed “information”…
