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stevenberlinjohnson.com

The weblog of Steven Johnson.

I read a galley copy of Oliver Morton's Eating The Sun: How Plants Power The Planet very quickly a few months ago, as I was finishing up Invention Of Air, in part because the two books have many shared obsessions, and because I knew I had a great deal to learn from Oliver's writing and thinking. I was very impressed with it then, but I when I went back to read it more slowly last month, I realized what a masterpiece the book was: a kind of epic poem to the power and potentiality of photosynthesis.

Oliver and I met years ago -- thanks to the sublime Denise Caruso -- and have kept in touch loosely since then, but there's no need for a full disclosure here; this book is so great I'd be singing its praises even if we were arch rivals. Eating The Sun is many things. It's a story of scientific discovery told with great clarity and narrative drive, and it's a mind-expanding rumination on life, energy, and the future of our planet. The book has descriptions of natural and semi-natural landscapes (including Priestley's haunts at Bowood) that are just exquisite. And it's a refreshingly optimistic call-to-arms that talks about our climate crisis as something that is both immense and potentially manageable, making the most compelling case for radical innovation in solar energy that I've read to date. I hope there are Obama people who are reading this book right now--it should be

"A Shot Of The Purest Oxygen"November 18

I received the final books for The Invention Of Air the other day, which is always an exciting milestone, after the seemingly endless drip of first-pass pages, pre-galleys, galleys that leads up to the publication of a book. I've been flipping through it on and off for the past few days now, and I think it turned out really well. (I'm finally lifting out of the inevitable phase at the end of the edit cycle, where you're just so sick of re-reading everything that you can't tell whether it's any good.)

We also had our first big review last week: Publisher's Weekly featured it as a special "signature review," penned by Simon Winchester, whose books I very much admire. It's positive throughout, and ends with a fantastic quote that I may have to have tattooed to my forehead for the book tour:

The inﬂuence of [Priestley]—he was a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, a tolerant stoic and a rationalist utterly opposed to religious fundamentalism—was quite astonishing, and Steven Johnson makes a brave and generally successful attempt to summarize and parse the degree to which this inﬂuence infected the founding principles of the American nation. As a reminder of the underlying sanity and common sense of this country—a reminder perhaps much needed after the excesses of a displeasing presidential election campaign—The Invention of Air succeeds like a sh

Outside.in looking for a CTONovember 12

It's been a very good six months at outside.in. We've launched Radar, our GeoToolkit platform, and just yesterday rolled out our API. And we're starting to see our traffic numbers really take off at an amazing rate: our core site audience has grown 400% this year; more than a thousand bloggers and media sites are now using our tools as part of the outside.in network (and it's only about two months old!) And we've got some great new tools and services in the short-term pipeline...

Of course, that kind of rapid growth creates a new set of challenges, most of them revolving around scaling. To date, our amazing co-founder and CTO Cory Forsyth has done a tremendous job creating the whole outside.in ecosystem, from the core site to the network tools to the admin system. But we know that there are big performance and scaling issues involved in building an architecture that can support massive traffic, and play a critical role in the evolving geo-web across tens of thousands of network partners. Putting all that together is a job in itself.

So we're looking for a CTO who has extensive experience building web applications with that level of usage who will work alongside Cory (he'll become our VP of Engineering.) It's a great gig, with lots of fun challenges and about as enjoyable an office environment as you could imagine. Our CEO Mark Josephson has

The System WorkedNovember 5

A thousand important things have been said already about the milestone of our first African-American president (and perhaps just as important for future demographic trends, our first mixed-race president.) But I've been thinking about something else this morning: not just Obama's election, but the entire system that led up to this moment. We hear so often that the American political system is broken, but I think the last two years suggest that our national politics are healthier than we have been led to believe.

It starts for me with Bush's approval rating. You run the country with breathtaking incompetence for eight years; you defy the constitution and the Geneva Conventions; you let an entire city drown; you fail to ask for an inch of sacrifice from the rich during the greatest concentration of wealth in our country's history. You do all those things, and it turns out the American people pay attention: you become the least popular president since the invention of polling. Yes, it took too long for the country to realize how disastrous the Bush Administration was, but 9/11 left us with a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder that made it too hard to turn on our leader in time to vote him out the first chance we had. But eventually the country woke up.

Then when the campaigns began, they were serious, engaged, and hard-fought. Voters consistently out-manoeuvred the media consensus at pretty much every turn. Giant financial advantages or na

My Pal Alex Visits The Genius BarSeptember 23

Every year around this time I pick up a newspaper, scan the news, and announce loudly to anyone in earshot, "Damn! I can't believe I didn't win a MacArthur Genius Grant this year! What is wrong with those people?"

It's a joke, I swear, but this year I didn't even make it to the punchline, because the first name I saw in the Times story about this year's Geniuses is my old friend Alex Ross, whom I have known since seventh grade, and whose praises I have sung on this blog before. What a great call by the MacArthur folks. Go, Alex!