Alex Wright

A Trip to the Morgue May 25, 2009

The daily broadsheet newspaper may one day go the way of the linotype, but down in a basement on 41st street sits a living time capsule from the old ink-stained world: The New York Times morgue...
Read more »

Throw Down Your Heart April 24, 2009

In the spirit of Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club and Paul Simon’s Graceland, banjo wizard Bela Fleck spent several weeks in Africa a few years back, tracking down the banjo’s historical...
Read more »

Round-up April 2, 2009

Posting has slowed to a moribund pace around here lately, due in part to my perpetually back-burnered plans to finish migrating this site over to Wordpress. This state of affairs is likely to persist for a while, so in the meantime...
Read more »

Digging Deep February 23, 2009

Today's Times is running my piece on the Deep Web, the largely invisible realm of content stored in databases that doesn't show up in a typical Google search. ...
Read more »

Mush, eh? January 6, 2009

Allow me to debunk the first myth of dog-sledding: "Mush!" means nothing to sled dogs, at least if said dogs are French Canadian huskies. To make them go, you say "Allez!" while giving the sled a shove. To slow down,...
Read more »

Year-end round-up December 23, 2008

Next year, I'm aspiring to take Merlin Mann's advice and consolidate my naked acts of self-promotion down to an occasional monthlyish update, in hopes of finding more compelling things to write about. So in the interest of starting 2009 with...
Read more »

Worldstreams interview December 16, 2008

Last week I spent about an hour chatting with Said Leghlid at Worldstreams Radio in a free-ranging conversation about assorted topics in my book, punctuated by a few decidedly curveball questions from listeners. In the space of about 10 minutes,...
Read more »

Theobroma November 29, 2008

After reading last week's New Yorker profile of Sam Calagione, the Dogfish Head impresario who seems to be emerging as the craft beer industry's gonzo counterpart to Bonny Doon Vineyard's Randall Grahm, I found myself hankering for a taste of...
Read more »

Designing Universal Knowledge November 16, 2008

A few months ago, Amsterdam-based information designer Gerlinde Schuller approached me about writing an essay for a book about so-called universal knowledge systems. The result is "http://www.theworldasflatland.net/report1.htm">The World as Flatland: Designing Universal Knowledge, an unusual compendium that ranges across...
Read more »

Grant Park November 5, 2008

Under the terms of my employment, I'm precluded from making any public show of support for any political candidate or cause. So I made my best effort at feigning journalistic detachment as I waded into the crowd at Chicago's Grant...
Read more »

Teaching Innovation October 20, 2008

I spent this past weekend in Kansas City, taking part in a Foreign Policy Research Institute seminar on teaching the history of innovation. The organizers pulled together an impressive roster of speakers, including Professors Peter Watson, Dennis Shasha, David Hounshell...
Read more »

Now in paperback October 15, 2008

Thanks to the nice folks at Cornell University Press, my book is about to come out in a shiny new paperback edition (available for pre-order on Amazon.com). This new edition includes a few corrections and minor updates (thanks to all...
Read more »

Bluegrass Nation October 9, 2008

I was sorely disappointed to miss last weekend's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco, but I'm taking consolation in two NYC shows on my calendar for the next couple of nights: Dobro maestro Jerry Douglas and my favorite alt-bluegrass...
Read more »

TimesPeople September 22, 2008

For the past few months, I've been working with a team of NYTimes developers on TimesPeople, a new social sharing service for NYTimes.com. We just launched the service today, after a trial balloon period as a Firefox plug-in. This is...
Read more »