Bylines

W. Patrick McCray

The Bargaining Chips Are … Chips: On Chris Miller’s “Chip War”

The Bargaining Chips Are … Chips: On Chris Miller’s “Chip War”

"An account of how chips became a strategically vital resource whose importance is overlooked at our peril.”
Book cover of Whole Earth, featuring an image of Stewart Brand backlit and walking through a door, encircled by the earth.

On Floating Upstream

Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great deal of his career.
Book cover.

No Geniuses Here

A new book challenges the notion that independent inventors were shunted aside in the 20th century by anonymous scientists in corporate research laboratories.
Survival Piece I: Hog Pasture (1970-71) by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, for the exhibition ‘Earth, Air, Fire and Water’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Art Lessons From the 1970s For Survival In An Ecologically Blighted World

The Harrisons’ eco-art told stories about the apocalypse, pointing to a future where we’d all have to be survival artists
People dancing at Woodstock

When Science Was Groovy

Counterculture-inspired research flourished in the Age of Aquarius.

Science’s Freedom Fighters

Why do Americans get so worked up by the basic assertion that all science is political?
Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver collaborating on an art project

“God Help American Science”: Engineering Theatre and Spectacle

When an event promises you will "hear the body broadcast its sounds," "see without light," and "see dancers float on air,” there’s bound to be disappointment.