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James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist and biographer whose best-selling books include The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and Chaos: Making a New Science.^[1] Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize^[2][3][4] and National Book Award^[5][6] finalists. They have been translated into more than twenty languages.^[7]

Biography [link]

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard University, graduating in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

After the publication of Chaos, Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series.

Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

Work [link]

Among the scientists Gleick profiled in the New York Times Magazine were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, and Benoit Mandelbrot. His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. He wrote the "Fast Forward" column on technology 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.

Bibliography [link]

James Gleick talks about The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood on Bookbits radio.

• 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0670811785)
• 1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
• 1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
• 1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
• 2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
• 2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
• 2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
• 2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )

References [link]

External links [link]

• James Gleick's website with selections of his work.
• A Miracle Made Lyrical, Christopher Lydon interview with James Gleick.
• The Narrative Thread, James Gleick talks with Robert Birnbaum.
• Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, article on the culture of Wikipedia.
• If Shakespeare Had Been Able to Google, article by Gleick from The New York Review of Books.
• Audio: James Gleick in conversation with Janna Levin at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.
• 'Science writer James Gleick explains the physics that define new media in the ongoing communications revolution' by Peter Kadzis, interview in the Boston Phoenix, April 6, 2011.
• C-SPAN Video: James Gleick discusses his book, The Information.