Digging deep in the texts of both literature and science, N. Katherine Hayles exemplifies the reconciliation of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” better than anyone I know. Her refusal to concentrate on either side of the fence, instead insisting on plowing new ground on both sides, has lead her to some of the most intriguing research currently being done. Looking at texts from all sources and angles, Hayles is always seeing new things that others overlook.

Malcolm Gladwell’s applied epidemiology picks up where the overwrought meme metaphor breaks down. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell explores and explains complex social and market phenomena through a sturdy, methodical framework and with engaging, easy-to-understand language. Unlike many social theorists, Gladwell eschews grandiose postulating and sticks to good ol’ tried-and-true observation and acutely intuitive pattern-recognition. Ace journalist with an intellect to match, Malcolm Gladwell could just be one of today’s most important writers.

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the “deep structure” of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found “order for free” in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as “Kauffman sets”) which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. …

My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
When I last spoke with Rudy Rucker, his nonfiction collection Seek! and science-fiction novel Saucer Wisdom were just finding their way into bookstores. Since that time, Rucker has been hacking on a video game programming toolkit called the Pop Framework and keeping a low profile on the science-fiction scene. After bouncing a few emails with him, it was obvious that we needed to do another interview and shed some light on his latest projects.

We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we’re all coming to realize that it’s becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity?

The deconstruction of organized sound put forth by multi-instrumentalist composer and improviser Weasel Walter is fiercely aimed at destroying the complacency of music and musicians. This is nowhere more evident than in his rotating cast of characters known as the Flying Luttenbachers. He describes the working plan of the Luttenbachers thusly, “The nature of operations has been to utilize the most appropriate people available — pushing the resulting chemistry as far as possible — and finally to abandon the formation when creative stasis has been reached.” Though he renounces all …

Mark Dery contributed this piece to my book Follow for Now. I’m reposting it here for your enjoyment.
Terence McKenna died of brain cancer on April 3, 2000. He was 53. This article was originally published in the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine 21C (“The Inner Elf: Terence McKenna’s Trip,” 21C, #3, 1996) and later reprinted in the 21C anthology Transit Lounge (Craftsman House, 1997). Its centerpiece is a lengthy interview with McKenna, conducted in two epic sessions in 1996.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now. It was originally on Paul’s site, djspooky.com.
“The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is spatialized.” — Henri Bergson, “Creative Evolution,” 1911
Manuel De Landa writes from a strange pataphysical world of disjunctions and fluid transitions — a milieu where writing about ideas becomes a fluid dialectic switching from steady state to flux and back again in the blink of an eye, or the turn of a sentence. His style of thinking is a …

My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Rudy Rucker has a lot of things on his mind. Although his day job has him teaching computer science and mathematics at San Jose State University, Rucker is a writer. He has written twenty nonfiction and science-fiction books covering such topics as higher dimensions, artificial life, and biotechnology. Called the original cyberpunk author by many, his self-described “transreal” writing style is akin to Kerouac’s On the Road (Viking, 1959) and an issue of Scientific …

My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Sean Gullette is a very busy man. With seemingly contradictory roles as both a webmaster for KGB Media and a computer skeptic, he splits his time between graphic design work and acting. Gullette has been in ten independent films, including the leading role as Maximillian Cohen in Pi, the winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Award for Best Directing. Pi is a film about a brilliant, paranoid mathematician who teeters on the brink …