One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist w

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastic

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a re

In the summer of 2016, I gave a talk at a small TED x conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I’ve never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people s

November 1, 2021 Español Português हिन्दी Chinese Dossier N°46 A data ‘cloud’ sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise

I never imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana, the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, and the most