Selected Articles & Book Chapters
Art Out of Order: Jack Burnham, the 1970 ‘Software’ Exhibition, and the Aesthetics of Information Systems,” Technology and Culture 63, no. 3 (2022): 689-717.
“Fallout and Spinoff: Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, David Cateforis, et al., eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 61-78. [pdf]
“The Biggest Data of All: Making and Sharing a Digital Universe, Osiris, 32, 2017: 243-263 [pdf]
“Of Gravity and Geese,” Leonardo, 50, no. 3 (2017): 347-351. [pdf]
“How the Astronomers Digitized the Sky,” Technology and Culture, 55, 4 (2014): 908-944. [pdf]
“California Dreamin’: Visioneering the Technological Future,” in Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, edited by Volker Janssen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 347-78. [pdf]
“‘Globalization with Hardware’” ITER’s Fusion of Technology, Policy, and Politics,” History and Technology, 26, 4 (2010): 281-310. [pdf]
“From Lab to iPod: A Story of Discovery and Commercialization in the Post-Cold War Era,” Technology and Culture, 50, 1 (2009): 58-81. [pdf]
“Amateur Scientists, the International Geophysical Year, and the Ambitions of Fred Whipple.” Isis 97, 4 (2006): 634-658 [reprinted in Science and the American Century: Perspectives on Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and David Kaiser, University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 210-234]. [pdf]
“Will Small Be Beautiful? Making Policies for Our Nanotech Future.” History and Technology 21, 2 (2005): 177-203. [reprinted in Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future, edited by Deborah Johnson and Jameson Wetmore (MIT Press, 2008), p. 323-354]. [pdf]
“MBE Deserves a Place in the History Books,” Nature Nanotechnology, 2, 5 (2007): 259-261. [pdf]
“Project Vista, Caltech, and the Dilemmas of Lee DuBridge.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 34, 2 (2004): 339-370. [pdf]
“The Contentious Role of a National Observatory,” Physics Today, 56, 10 (2003): 55-61. [pdf]
“What Makes a Failure? Designing a New National Telescope, 1975-1984,” Technology and Culture, 42, 2 (2001): 265-291. [pdf]
“Large Telescopes and the Moral Economy of Recent Astronomy,” Social Studies of Science 30, 5 (2000): 685-711. [pdf]
Some Recent Essays & Reviews
“Dirty Digits and Pleasant Landscapes” (essay length review of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism by Jason Heppler), Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2024 (link)
“The Bargaining Chips Are…Chips” (essay length review of Chip War by Chris Miller) Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2022 (link)
“On Floating Upstream,” (essay length review of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff) Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2022 (link)
“No Geniuses Here,” (essay length review of American Independent Inventors by Eric Hintz) Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2021 (link)
“Stewart Brand’s Radical Environmentalism,” Science 372, no. 6537 (2 April 2021) (link)
“Silicon Valley’s Hidden Voices,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2021 (link)
“Foggy Notions,” (essay length review of Rational Fog by Susan Lindee) Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2020. (link)
“The Art of Survival,” Aeon, October 2020. (link)
“Big in Japan: How Art, Tech, and PepsiCo Collaborated, Then Clashed, At the 1970 World’s Fair,” IEEE Spectrum, March 2020: 40-47. [pdf]
“Selling a Charismatic Technology,” (essay-length review of The Charisma Machine by Morgan Ames), Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2020. [link]
“Silicon Valley: A Region High on Historical Amnesia,” (review of The Code by Margaret O’Mara), Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2019. [link]
“When Science Was Groovy,” Science 365, no. 6453 (9 August 2019): 550-551. [pdf]
“Snow’s Storm,” Science 364, no. 6439 (3 May 2019): 430-432. [pdf]
"When the Telescope Met the Computer: Making and Sharing a Digital Universe", public lecture at the American Institute of Physics, 2019. [link]
“Science’s Freedom Fighters,” (review of Freedom’s Laboratory by Audra Wolfe), Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2018. [link]
“Silicon Valley’s Bonfire of the Vainglorious,” (review of To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell and Valley of the Gods by Alexandra Wolfe) Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2017. [link]
“Re-Wiring Art and Technology in the 1960s,” public DASER talk at the National Academy of Sciences, 2016. [link]
“It’s Not All Lightbulbs,” Aeon, October 2016. [link]
“Life as a Verb: Applying Buckminster Fuller to the 21st Century,” (review of You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future by Jonathon Keats); Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2016. [link]
“Gods of Small Things,” invited essay for Slate, September 2016. [link]
“The Technologists’ Siren Song,” The Chronicle Review, 14 March 2014: B4-B5. [link]
Media Stuff
“Maintaining Innovation,” roundtable discussion at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2017. [link]
“A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions,” video of talk at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2016.[link]
99% Invisible episode from 2016 featuring my Visioneers work. [link]
“Lasers and art” featured in 2016 episode of Science Friday. [link]
2015 episode of Science Friday on “Art and Technology”. [link]
