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Last week I handed in the first draft of my new book. This week my little (but growing) family packed up our Manhattan apartment of the past six years, and set sail for (or tunneled our way to) the fine borough of Brooklyn. After two days of opening boxes, and dodging the construction team that's still finishing up the renovations we're doing, we're more settled than not. This in fact is the first post from my new study, which is a lovely little space on the top floor blessed with the brilliant asset of a door. (Ever since our son was born, and kicked me out of my old study, I'd been working in a corner of a large room that also functioned as kitchen, living room, and loft bedroom.) At long last I can stay up late listening to music and posting regrettable things on the Internet. Good news for the blog, in other words, as well as for me.

We've moved to Park Slope, which is one of the classic New York neighborhoods, for those of you not familiar with it: perfectly preserved tree-lined streets of late 19th-century brownstones descending down from Olmsted's other great NYC park. As it happened, we moved in at the absolute peak time of year here: brilliant crisp 68-degree weather, tulip magnolias and cherry trees and lilacs in full splendor. We took so long getting out of our old place that the movers didn't actually start unloading the van until around 7 PM, precisely as the rest of the neighborhood was strolling home from the subway. It was a really touching scene: everybody out on the street, chatting with each other, stopping by our place to introduce themselves and offer help. I was a little worried that I'd get out here and feel pangs for Manhattan, but I haven't felt anything like that at all, mostly because all the things I love about the Village -- sidewalk-centric life, neighborhood camaraderie, great architecture and restaurants and bars -- are all out here as well, only you get fabulous green outdoor environments, and you can afford much more space indoors.

The new homeowner thing has been pretty funny. Last night I took a bath and set off a torrential leak in the basement that had to be repaired today, and I've been watering my lawn (okay, my 12 by 30 foot plot of grass) like a maniac. All the joys of suburban life, without actually having to move to the suburbs!

My Trip To Freedom

Just returned from a three-day trip to Paris to speak at a Microsoft conference, which was held at Disneyland Paris -- as you might imagine, a strange place to find yourself in the middle of the Iraq war. I managed to squeeze in a day in Paris itself after the talk, a day that turned out to be absolute peak Paris in the spring: flowering trees everywhere and vast blue skies. I'll spare you all the pictures, but it was an exquisite day. (One that is rapidly fading from memory, given the mini-blizzard we're having right now in New York.) A couple of stray thoughts from the trip:

1. The afternoon that I arrived I made a quick excursion to the Magic Kingdom solely to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (In my experience, the EuroDisney version of Pirates is the best.) I've probably gone on that ride 25 times in my life, but this time, an entirely new thought occurred to me. Forgive the flair for the obvious here, but those pirates are terrorizing that town: they're firing on it with huge cannons; they're setting fire to houses; they're drunkenly chasing after local women, presumably to rape them; they're shooting off weapons indiscriminately into open windows. If you think about people in the actual Caribbean towns hundreds of years ago, being attacked by pirates must have been just about one of the most terrifying things you could imagine. Pirates were the Al Qaeda of the 18th century. But on the ride, they're not even supposed to be scary; it's all played for comic relief. All of which made me wonder: in two hundred years, when we've all moved on to new fears (gray goo and sentient machines, no doubt) will Disney roll out a new set of rides? Suicide Bombers of the Middle East? Terrorists of New York?

2. I'm always struck by this when I visit France, and this trip was no exception. We may be lagging behind the French in our social safety net, our wines and cheeses, and the beauty of our cities, but the one area that we are clearly superior to them is technology that prevents water from spilling out all over the bathroom when you take a shower. My hotel had a small pane of glass practically the size of a car window anchored to the nozzle-side of the shower, and nothing else. Is there some kind of embargo in France that's keeping shower curtains out of the country? I took a five minute shower and when I got out the bathroom looked like the set of The Poseidon Adventure.

3. I watched a little of the BBC World coverage, and it was immediately apparent how different the angle of presentation was. You couldn't watch for more than a few minutes without seeing an Iraqi corpse. The overall threshold of permissible violence was much higher than on the US networks, which made it quite gruesome to watch. (Appropriately so, of course.) The interesting thing was that having established a stronger connection to the Iraqi point of view made the broadcasts actually more sympathetic to the American cause, because you were able to get a closer look at Iraqi soldiers explaining how they didn't want to be fighting, and how they were hoping that the Americans would arrive sooner rather than later.

4. On the Air France flight back, the flight attendant voiceover gave the standard spiel about how this was a non-smoking flight, and tampering with smoke detectors in the bathroom would make you "lee-able" for prosecution. And then they said, "If you would like a nicotine supplement at any time, please ask your flight attendant and we'll be happy to provide you with one." Maybe Mayor Bloomberg should institute a comparable program for New York City's newly smoke-free bars...

Where I'm at

I'm out town for the next few days, staying with friends about two hours north of the city, though I popped in for twelve hours just now to give a speech. Weirdly, the place we're staying has zero mass media: the satellite dish is down, there's no local reception, and there doesn't seem to be a radio anywhere. To follow the war, I've been logging on over a 28.8 connection, and occasionally breaking down and going out to the car to listen to staticky AM radio broadcasts.

I'm still trying to figure out if I have anything useful to express about this thing, beyond a general feeling of dread and a muted sense of hope that's it's going to be over in a few days. But it's surreal to be so isolated these last few days, after having watched the news networks build up to this story so relentlessly over the past months. (I loved how CNN's special ticker was promising the "latest news from Showdown Iraq," as though Showdown Iraq was the name of the event itself.) But on the whole, I think I'm better off not glued to the TV for once. It was a lovely, if incredibly muddy, early-spring day today, and we spent most of it chasing our son out of giant puddles. Beats Wolf Blitzer in a gas mask any day.

Vanity Site, Cont.

Here are a few things you can read about me and my work online:

"Maybe you're like me and you used Steven Johnson's exhausting writing as a sleep aid. When Feed folded, it saddened me that I'd have to start drinking more or buy some Tylenol PM."

"Steven Johnson's Emergence is a very bad book, shallow, careless, and disappointing.... In short, Mr. Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase 'born yesterday,' a degree of ignorance and juvenile solipsism that borders on arrogance."

"Emergence presents no insight, depth, or even meaningful speculation about this wonderful field."

Okay, now that we've gotten those delightful comments out of the way (I always saw my writing as more Aleve than Tylenol PM, but what can I say?) I wanted to point you to a very generous "appreciation" of my work that just went up a few days ago. (Permalinks don't seem to be working, so scroll down a few entries to read it.) I'm linking to this not just because it's very flattering, but mainly because it highlights something I've tried very hard to do with my writing (and with FEED) -- namely, build a bridge between my background in cultural theory and my current foreground of science and technology issues. Too often, I think, those two worlds are seen as fundamentally incompatible with each other, when in fact there are many productive commonalities between them. I wrote about this a little in my response to John Brockman's New Humanists essay, and one of these days I'm going to get around to writing a longer version of the argument. The most interesting writing today, in my humble opinion, is material that connects the insights of science and culture, rather than using one to dismantle the other. Think of a book like Michael Pollan's wonderful Botany Of Desire, which is equally informed by Nietzche and Richard Dawkins. Or on the more academic side, Manuel De Landa's 1,000 Years Of Non-Linear History, which is half Deleuze and half Santa Fe Institute.

With any luck, the new book I'm working on will be a useful addition to this growing field. But that's probably just my juvenile solipsism talking.

Updated, March 11, 4:00 PM: Thanks to everyone writing in with sympathy notes about those first three quotes, but no worries -- I couldn't be happier with the reviews and reception for Emergence. I just didn't feel like I could link to an "appreciation" of me without prefacing it with some contrary opinions. It just seemed too self-congratulatory without some kind of buffer -- and plus, I liked the first quote about the Tylenol PM. It's always nice to hear that you're indirectly keeping someone on the sauce...

TED Exit Poll

Just arrived back from a week on the West Coast, spent mostly luxuriating in the TED Conference, which was an utter joy to attend. Interestingly, it seems to have been very lightly blogged, given its technology focus and the wifi network set up in the downstairs "simulcast" auditorium. So here are a couple of impressions/highlights...

First, there was very little pure salesmanship on the stage, at least in the form of someone pitching a product that they were trying largely to make money off of. Dean Kamen (who tooled around on a Segway the entire week) talked about his portable Stirling Engine/Water Purification system, which he no doubt intends to make money off, but it was pretty clear from the talk -- which was note-perfect -- that what was driving him was a progressive, world-improving vision, not a profit motive. Most of the talks were either dire forecasts about our near and long-term future or uplifting glimpses of ideas that might keep that future from happening. In between were a few celebrations of amazing-tech-for-amazing-tech's-sake, and some wonderful performances. You know you're at a pretty unusual conference when Thomas Dolby is the guy on the side of the stage playing a keyboard to let the speakers know they have only two minutes left for their talks.

A few specific items:

A number of presenters introduced a slide by saying, "this is the most important graph you'll see all year." But by my lights the most compelling -- and terrifying -- one was shown early on by Laurie Garrett: what demographers are calling the "chimney" effect in Africa's population. It basically shows two populations superimposed over each other: the population of Africa with AIDS, and what it would have been like without AIDS. It's basically a society of infants, teenagers and grandparents with almost no one in between -- no 20-50 year-olds to create a workforce or educate the kids. Absolutely gruesome.

On a lighter note, Marvin Minsky walked through a couple of half-serious ideas for combating the population explosion -- ideas that he seemed a little surprised that no one was yet exploring. My favorite: make people smaller! If we're going to be able to genetically engineer ourselves, maybe we should work on shrinking ourselves down so the planet can fit more of us. As Minsky pointed out, a 6-inch person is a thousand times smaller, volume-wise, than a normal-sized one. Of course, he didn't get into the crucial corollary problem we'd have to solve if we pulled this off -- namely, Giant Killer Squirrels -- but I'm sure with time we could solve that one too.

The first day ended with a one-two punch that you probably won't see again. DJ Spooky as an opening act for Freeman Dyson. I loved Dyson's idea that if the universe doesn't turn out to be teeming with life, perhaps then it should be up to us to plant the seeds, by sending out extremophile sunflowers capable of thriving in the cold vacuum of space.

Mitch Kapor gave a great talk on his open source Chandler project, and I grilled Mitch over lunch about all the features I wanted to see show up in the final version. No matter what I threw at him, he'd say: "That's easy -- of course you'll be able to do that in Chandler." In other words, I can't wait.

Only real disappointment: Brian Eno, who was supposed to be part of the Emergence panel, canceled at the last minute, because his opposition to the war made traveling to America and talking about music seem intolerable. I understand the sentiment, but I don't think any of us would have objected if he had come and thundered against the war instead of talking about music (as many of the presenters chose to do.)

My talk would have been familiar to readers of this blog: after a little intro on why NYC was so resilient in the immediate wake of 9/11, I talked about all the interesting emergent things happening on the web right now: I did a little bit on two-way links, a little Googleshare fun, a lot of Technorati plugs (Sifry, you owe me big time!), and ended with a recap of the power law debate, which no one else mentioned on the stage. I think it went over pretty well -- I'd preloaded it with some very nice Keynote visual effects and a couple of meta-conference jokes that I knew would work, so I actually found myself really looking forward to getting up on stage. I don't think I've ever given a talk in front of a crowd where so many people had read my book -- lots of wonderful conversations with new folks telling me how Emergence had inspired them. Very rewarding all around.

Updated March 7, 11:00 AM: Here's a snapshot of me giving my talk -- note my lovely Keynote presentation in the background.

Homeowners!

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with good wishes about our house closing yesterday -- I'm happy to report that we are in possession of a 100-year-old brownstone right off of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It needs quite a bit of work, but we're pretty thrilled. Anyone who has ever lived in New York City will understand that the most amazing thing right now is contemplating the idea that we own something with 1) a backyard, and 2) a basement. I may actually have to learn how to use power tools without injuring myself just to live up to this new space. You can click here for a picture of the front if you're so inclined.