James Gleick (/ɡlɪk/;[1] born August 1, 1954) is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time".[2][3] He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm.[4]
He wrote the "Fast Forward" column in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999, and his essays charting the growth of the Internet formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
After the publication of Chaos, he collaborated with photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton. John Banville said the latter would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come."[15]
Gleick's writing style has been described as a combination of "clear mind, magpie-styled research and explanatory verve."[16] In 1989–90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. In 2000 he was the first editor of The Best American Science Writing series. Gleick was elected president of the Authors Guild in 2017.
The Pipeline
As a reaction to poor user experience with procmail configuration at Panix, in 1993 Gleick founded The Pipeline, one of the earliest Internet service providers in New York City.[17] The Pipeline was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface, incorporating e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web, through software for Windows and Mac operating systems.[18][19]
Gleick and business partner Uday Ivatury licensed the Pipeline software to other Internet service providers in the United States and overseas. In 1995 Gleick sold The Pipeline to PSINet, where it was later absorbed into MindSpring and then EarthLink.[20][21]
Aircraft accident
On 20 December 1997 Gleick was attempting to land his Rutan Long-EZexperimental plane at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, New Jersey, when a build-up of ice in the engine's carburetor caused the aircraft engine to lose power and the plane landed short of the runway into rising terrain.[22] The impact killed Gleick's eight-year-old son, Harry, and left Gleick seriously injured.[23][24]
James Gleick, "The Fate of Free Will" (review of Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton University Press, 2023, 333 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 1 (18 January 2024), pp. 27–28, 30. "Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. Artificial intelligences – disembodied, strangers to blood, sweat, and tears – have no occasion for that." (p. 30.)
James Gleick, "The Prophet Business" (review of Glenn Adamson, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, Bloomsbury, 2024, 336 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 3 (27 February 2025), pp. 6, 8, 10. "[Glenn] Adamson, having exposed... strains of failed futurology, suggests nonetheless that we... should continue to make our best guesses... always remembering that every prediction is a statement about the present... For... fourteen years, Wikipedia has included a[n] entry titled 'Timeline of the Far Future'... An editor responsible for one recent addition justified it with the comment, 'Adds a bit of hope.' A different editor deleted it a few seconds later." (p. 10.)
