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
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