History

L'odissea nera di John von Neumann, l'uomo che disegnò la mappa infernale del mondo che oggi abitiamo, nel nuovo straordinario libro di Benjamín Labatut. Quando alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale John von Neumann concepisce il MANIAC – un calcolatore universale che doveva, nelle intenzioni del suo creatore, «afferrare la scienza alla gola scatenando un potere di calcolo illimitato» –, sono in pochi a rendersi conto che il mondo sta per cambiare per sempre.

Bloomsbury presents Little Blue Dot by Katherine Dunn, read by Laurel Lefkow The unexplored history of GPS, a military technology turned daily necessity that impacts all aspects of our lives. Gone are the days when we pulled off to the side of the road, twisted a map this way and that, and...

The thrilling story of the nineteenth century's moonshot: An Atlantic-spanning telegraph cable that created the global village and changed the world. In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Nothing like it had ever been...

In January 2015, Craig Wright was facing financial ruin, with the Australian Taxation Office having uncovered a potentially criminal operation involving his raft of companies. Six months later he was sitting pretty, having signed a bailout deal that settled his tax affairs and afforded him a dream job in England. Somehow, Wright had turned it around. In truth, Wright had accepted a ticking time bomb. The deal that saved him was predicated on one very important premise: that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.

The definitive and “captivating” (Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power) story of San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. At the dawn of the...