stevenberlinjohnson.com

Brooks/Cheney

David Brooks writes about Obama and Clinton's Jefferson-Jackson speeches last November in his column this morning:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Nice. I don't know if Brooks has read Emergence or not, but one of things I take a little pride in is the connection between Jacobs and the world of decentralized software, Open Source, etc. People had obviously been thinking about those themes before I wrote Emergence but the whole concept of applying Jacobs' urban theories to the way we think about the web was something that hadn't been done before, as far as I know -- and now it's a much more familiar connection to people, so much so that Brooks can made an offhand reference to it without even walking though the logic. That's pretty cool to see.

While I'm patting myself on the back, I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can't reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I'm kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I'm not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there's something very cool about the idea. It's one of the things that's so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress -- even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn't get actual face time, but my ideas did.

Of course, all of this had made me think about how to get the next book into the hands of Obama... By the way, I have a new next book that I'm starting to write this month. More about that later.

Twitter

Okay, I caved. I'm twittering. Something about this trip to Europe made me finally sign up. We'll see how it turns out, but thus far it is pretty fun, though keeping to the 140 characters is pretty difficult for those of us who like to write 73 word sentences. I've got the last three posts running under the picture to the right, and you can follow me at Twitter.com/stevenbjohnson.

Ghost Map in paper (and more!)

The Ghost Map is officially out in paperback this week, sporting a great new cover and layout, with quotes from all the very flattering reviews we got last fall. It's fun when you see that first copy of the paperback, because all those reviews that you read so intensely a year ago have faded in your memory, and suddenly you get to revisit them all as a group. (It's also fun because the marketing people at your publisher have carefully excised anything that doesn't sound like a complete rave.) The Riverhead folks have also put together a pretty cool web site for the paperback -- with suggested reading links, video interviews with me, review quotes, and a pretty wild little animated film that I can only describe as "Yellow Submarine meets 28 Days Later." For those of you curious about the macro themes of the book, that first interview clip of me is, I think, the best summary of why those ten days in 1854 are so important to us today. (Other than the summary you get from, you know, actually reading the book.)

The other cool thing we just found out is that Ghost Map has been chosen as one of two finalists for the National Academies of Science 2007 Communications Award. In this case, "finalist" means "runner up" -- but the winner was one of my heroes, Eric Kandel, and it's a great honor just to be mentioned in the same press release with him. (Also winning, in different categories: the sublime Carl Zimmer, who gave me an insane amount of great advice at early stage writing Ghost Map, and the Radio Lab team, with whom I've collaborated on a couple of fun shows.)

September

I had such incredibly fun experiences at college (and to a lesser extent grad school) that even now that I've been out of school for almost fifteen years, I still have this vestigial sense of excitement every year right about now -- the sense that a new semester's about to start with all its possibilities....

We did manage to have a great summer with the kids this year, despite the fact that I had more of a day job (at outside.in) than I've had since the FEED years. My wife and I have this nice feeling of accomplishment right now that we managed to do as much as we did, given that we have three young kids now, including a one-year-old. We took trips to the Vineyard, and Shelter Island, and an epic trip out for my sister's wedding in California. The little boy learned to walk, the middle one learned to swim, the older one got completely baseball obsessed, demanding to read the papers every morning for the scores and standings, despite the fact that he doesn't, you know, actually know how to read. The boys got to see some of California's great landmarks -- Carmel, Point Lobos, Muir Woods -- and I shot a 78 at Pebble Beach.

All in all, a great summer, but man, am I excited it's over. I'm ready to settle in and get some serious work done, and for the older boys to be back in school. How was everyone else's summer?

Live SBJ

I'm doing a little long overdue maintenance on the blog and the first change you'll see in the sidebar here: a list  of all my upcoming public appearances.

Coming next: links to all my non-FEED writing since the late 90s.

And maybe after that, fingers crossed, the complete FEED archives restored.

This Is Cool

From a new interview in the Seattle Times with William Gibson:

Q. What books have you read lately that you can recommend?

"The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson, about a London cholera epidemic.

I still get a little thrill when I hear that people like William Gibson are actually taking the time to sit around and read one of my books. I mean, Neuromancer was on my orals reading list when I was in grad school at Columbia. Now if I can just get Pynchon to plug Everything Bad I can die happy.

Long Zoom for Long Now

This Friday at 6:30 I'm going to be giving one of the Seminars About Long Term Thinking for the Long Now Foundation. The event will be at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. I'm really excited about this, since a number of my friends and heroes created The Long Now originally, and because I'm going to be talking about some of the ideas in the new book for the first time in public. If you're in the Bay Area, try to come by... [Updated: note that the talk is now scheduled to start at 6:30.]

I meant to post this earlier, but I'm finally getting around to it now: Ghost Map was picked as one of Entertainment Weekly's ten best non-fiction books of the year:

Part 1 of Johnson's historical reconstruction is a minutely detailed account of London's cholera epidemic of 1854 and an eccentric physician's effort to map the outbreak and track its source. Part 2 is a thought-provoking celebration of cities and a meditation on the spread of ideas. The result: a riveting work that makes you give thanks for modern plumbing — and rethink your pessimism about urban sprawl.

Apparently we also made best-of-the-year lists at Library Journal, Playboy, and a few others I think, plus the NY Times Notable Books list. So that's all very cool.

Powells.com Interview

Ghost Map is currently the #1 book on Powells.com, in large part because they're running a very long interview with me that manages to cover pretty much my entire career and most of my obsessions. Some of it will be repetitive if you've been following the blog, but it's a great overview of where my head has been at (if that doesn't scare you off)including some material about the novel and cultural change that I haven't written much about:

Flaubert and Dickens take two very different approaches. Dickens invokes a magical side: "And then it turned out that this person was that person's long-lost cousin, who was the heir to..." You can see how the strain of trying to connect all these lives breaks down in the realism.

Flaubert's approach... You get a feeling when you read A Sentimental Education that it's kind of random. The plot is built out of chance encounters on the street that lead you in a not particularly clear direction. In Dickens those chance encounters reveal a secret heritage or a long-lost connection; Sentimental Education is more like a billiard table where you throw the balls out and they go off in different directions. They're both powerful ways of seeing the city in narrative form, just different strategies.

Financial Times

I had missed this review of Ghost Map from a few weeks back in the Financial Times. I love the opening:

I wonder how Steven Johnson pitched this book to his agent. Maybe he said something like this: "I want to describe how the cause of cholera was discovered in London in 1854 and how it made possible the enormous cities of today. I plan to write a lot about excrement, sewers and how horrible it is to die as your body suddenly expels litres of water and waste." Mmmm, nice. You need a strong digestion to get through the resulting book, The Ghost Map. If your stomach is up to it, your brain will benefit. The story of how John Snow, a London physician, proved that cholera came from drinking infected water, not from breathing noxious air, has been told repeatedly, but never with such intellectual dexterity and, despite the topic, so engagingly.

A number of people have made similar remarks about the topic itself being initially very repulsive. It's always meant in a flattering way: this guy actually makes cholera into a great airplane read. And so I'd love to be able to say that I took on a deliberately challenging topic and in spite of everything managed to turn it into a page turner. But the truth is from the beginning I thought of this material as distinctly commercial. Books about disease have historically done very well -- think Hot Zone or Influenza or even, in part, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It was really only when I started doing more of the research in London and realized how central human excrement was going to be to the story that I began to wonder if people were going to be grossed out in a bad way. It was right around then that On Bullshit had become a surprise bestseller, and so I joking said to my editor one day that perhaps we should call it On Shit.