I’m going to put the moves on her,’ he says gravely. ‘Things might get weird.’ He says it like a commando setting up a midnight raid. Like: Sure, this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous,...

Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning … and you came for an old book.

Neel cuts in: “Where’d you grow up?””Palo Alto,” she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel...

The space is appropriately shoe-boxy and all the shelves are there. I’ve set them up with a coordinate system, so my program can find aisle 3, shelf 13 all by itself. Simulated light from the...

What if, you know—what if hanging out with Griffo Gerritszoon wasn’t always that great? What if he was weird and dreamy? What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with...

America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I...

When every single piece of media you consume is time-stamped, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time shifted?

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze...

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

Not books.

So many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.

Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out.

The nature of immortality is a mystery,’ he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.’ But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I...

People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they’ll believe you.

I’d sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I’d get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about...

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we’re penciling it in for a Friday morning.

He’s like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.

The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.

Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?””Sounds like a Japanese game show.”Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science...

Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”Oh, I am very familiar with the...

Corvina must have been so different then … really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you...

The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced...

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.

She’s wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she’s a cartoon character—all of which are appealing alternatives.

…I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.