Lasting Impressions

Harvard's largest single bequest before 1950 was made by the shoe machinery inventer-entrepreneur Gordon-McKay. Even today, many of Harvard's computer science chairs bear his name. Yet he was only one of many prominent Bostonians who made their city the world capital of shoe manufacture a hundred years ago. The trust he helped organize, United Shoe Machinery (USM), was as admired and as controversial then as Microsoft is today.

Harvard Magazine website

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Why Engineers Don't Rule
WEBCAST: The Future of News, sponsored by the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
PODCAST: Schmentoring: The Positive Results of Negative People
Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) presents interviews.
Why the Future Is Behind Schedule, from the London Review of Books
New York Times Op-Ed: Searching for Dummies
Scholarship and Libraries in Transition -- Session Webcast from the University of Michigan
How Books Bounced -- and Bit -- Back, originally published in the Boston Globe
NPR Interview: The Connection (WBUR), "The Grid That Binds"
"Unique Approach Opens Up Realm of Research," Princeton Weekly Bulletin
TechTV: The Screen Savers (video and book excerpt, "Evolution of the Keyboard")
NPR interview (audio): The Diane Rehm Show: Our Own Devices
NPR Interview (audio): Dan Charles profiles Edward Tenner
NPR Interview (audio): A discussion of invention with Ira Flatow
NPR Interview: Recliners
WBUR On Point interview (audio)
WFMU Interview (audio) with Dorian Devins
Business Week Online interview (video): 100 Years of Innovation
WNYC Interview (audio) with Leonard Lopate
The Lemelson Center
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Selected Works

Books
Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology
Humanity remaking itself through technology
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
The self-cancelling, self-frustrating side of human ingenuity, and what to do about it.
Tech Speak: How to Talk High Tech
A spoof of jargon.
Magazine Articles
When Systems Fracture On the tendency of advanced technology to promote self-deception
A review of James R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology in Harvard Magazine
The Life of Chairs
How sitting customs have affected the human body
The Xanadu Effect
Are big structures harbingers of decline?
Lasting Impressions
Harvard's debt to the shoe industry
Environment for Genius
The Harvard Society of Fellows, a history and personal appreciation
Books/Essays
The French Connections
The U.S. military-industrial complex's surprising debt to France.