If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Insurance firms have always carefully studied real-world data to figure out what, precisely, constitutes a risky activity. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
When you're an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you're… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Why are online games so addictive? It's mostly the narcotic appeal of 'leveling.' — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
More than any other modern tool, computers are a total mystery to their users. Most people never open them up to fix them or… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
“While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
