Publications

Books

Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Comandeer our Daily Lives and Inner Realities (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Bitwise: A Life in Code (Pantheon, 2018)

Essays and Features

• The Tunnel at 25: Glass and Dirt: The Tunnel in Twelve Antitheses (Summer 2020)
• Tablet: Google Torah? (May 13, 2020)
• Tablet: Can the U.S. Flip Iran’s Internet Back On? (November 21, 2019)
• Music & Literature: László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (September 23, 2019)
• ANQ: A Critique of Giuliano Pascucci’s Attribution Methods (September 16, 2019)
• ANQ: Review of The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (August 21, 2019)
• Tablet: The Coming Gentrification of YouTube (June 19, 2019)
• Tablet: The Tech Industry Is Dead! Long Live the Tech Monopolies! (January 31, 2019)
• ANQ: Statistical Infelicities in The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (January 21, 2019)
• Tablet: Conspiratorial Thinking Is Getting Worse Because of the Internet (January 10, 2019)
• Authorship: ‘A cannon’s burst discharged against a ruinated wall’: A Critique of Quantitative Methods in Shakespearean Authorial Attribution (December 18, 2018)
• Literary Hub: When English and Code Both Feel Like Foreign Languages (August 30, 2018)
• Medium (Features): How Facebook Has Flattened Communication (August 28, 2018)
• Tablet: Deleting the Digital Name of God (August 27, 2018)
• The Boston Review: Programming My Child (August 23, 2018)
• The Daily Beast: The Sci-Fi Roots of the Far Right (September 17, 2017)
• Issues in Science & Technology: Ron Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment (Summer, 2017)
• New Scientist: If you want to be a philanthropist Jeff Bezos, take note (June 22, 2017)
• n+1: Confirmation Bias (February 23, 2017)
• MIT Technology Review: Alphabet’s Toxic-Comment Detector (February 24, 2017)
• MIT Technology Review: If Only AI Could Save Us From Ourselves (December 13, 2016)
• Los Angeles Review of Books: Make America Austria Again (August 7, 2016)
• Slate: Facilitated Communication Is a Cult That Won’t Die (November 12, 2015)
• Reuters: A child born today may live to see humanity’s end, unless… (June 18 2015)
• The American Reader: #JeNeSuisPasLiberal: The Quagmire of Online Leftism (Feb, 2015)
• The White Review: The Quick Time Event (May, 2014)
• n+1: Chat Wars (Issue 19: Spring 2014)
• 3am Magazine: Fighting Incompleteness: interview with Philip Kitcher (January 31, 2014)
• Nautilus: AI Has Grown Up and Left Home (December 19, 2013)
• 3am Magazine: The Body as Society, Prison, and Torture Device–Jose Donoso’s Fiction (December 11, 2013)
• Music & Literature 3: Iva Bittova and the Question of Eclecticism (October, 2013)
• The American Reader: Feature Review on Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (September 17, 2013)
• Slate: How to Amazon-ify the Washington Post (August 6, 2013)
• Slate: How Microsoft Lost Its Way, as Understood Through The Wire (July 19, 2013)
• Slate: I Would Have Hired Edward Snowden (June 18, 2013)
• The American Reader: The Cosmology of Serialized Television (June 18, 2013)
• Thomson and Craighead’s Never Odd or Even: Archimedes’ Mindscrew (May-July 2013)
• Music & Literature 2: The Pythagorean Comma and the Howl of the Wolf (Spring 2013)
• The Nation: You Are What You Click: On Microtargeting (March 1, 2013)
• Triple Canopy: The Resistance of Melancholics: On Aaron Swartz (January 18, 2013)
• The White Review: Choose Your Own Formalism (August, 2012)
• n+1: The Stupidity of Computers (July 5, 2012)
• Triple Canopy: Anonymity as Culture (and Case Studies) (February 9, 2012)
• n+1: Two Daughters (December 31, 2011)
• ReadySteadyBook: Hans Blumenberg and His Myth Science Arkestra  (July 8, 2011)
• Times Literary Supplement: Moi and Lui and a Beehive (On Denis Diderot’s Oeuvres Philosophiques) (May 6, 2011)
  
• The Millions: The Prescient Science Fiction of Thomas M. Disch (April 16, 2010)

Column

• Slate: Bitwise (weekly, 2013-2016)

Book Reviews

• Los Angeles Review of Books: Martin Gardner’s Undiluted Hocus-Pocus (November 4, 2013
• Los Angeles Review of Books: Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind (June 17, 2013)
• Los Angeles Review of Books: Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae (May 13, 2013)
• Los Angeles Review of Books: Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure (March 6, 2013)
• Bookforum: Andrew Blum’s Tubes (August 7, 2012)
• St. Mark’s Poetry Project: Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl (January, 2011)

Literary Essays for The Quarterly Conversation

• The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai
• The 19th Century Russian Great Nikolai Leskov
• Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
• Vladimir Sorokin: Meat and Clones
• Cargo 200: Blurred Spaces
• Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident

Selected Patents

• System and method for multi-protocol communication in a computer network United States 6,549,937 Issued April 15, 2003
• Methods and systems for processing contact information United States 7333976 Issued February 19, 2008
• Systems and methods for performing a directory search United States 7761439 Issued July 20, 2010
• Methods and systems for processing media files United States 8099407 Issued January 17, 2012

Projects

• The Enneadecameron
• Lucan’s Civil War
• Proust Blog

Presentations

• Big Salesman is Watching You (Brooklyn College, April 24, 2014)
• Functional Classification in Finnegans Wake: A Sellarsian Account (Wilfrid Sellars Centenary Conference Workshop, June 2012)
• Code as Translation (AWP, March 2013)

Fiction

• The Lincolnshire Poacher (Brink Magazine, October 2008)
• Senescence: A Novel