Mark Pontin Articles & Dispatches

Writer, Editor, Consultant

How I Learned To Keep Worrying Even If North Korea Didn’t Test an H-Bomb

The Total Information Awareness Program Lives On
Beyond Gravity: the Quest To Take Out Our Orbital Trash

Chin’s Anti-Missile Test: Why?

Weather Engineering In China

TerraForming Earth

Cooling the Planet

The Alien Novelist

Peter Drucker Interview

Austan Goolsbee: Obama’s Economist

Outrageous Fortune: How the Rothschild Family Shaped World Economics

Lie Detection

Better Facial Recognition Technology

Move Over, Big Brother

Confusing Osama Bin Laden With Johnny Rotten

Taking the Spy Out of Spying

Artificial Societies and Virtual Violence

Towards a New Vision of Manned Spaceflight

Failure Is Not An Option – Gene Kranz

NASA’s Bold Plan for Private Spaceflight

Technology and the Future of Warfare

The Missiles of August – 1

The Missiles of August – 2

The Great Transformation

Rethinking the Unthinkable

On Display: the Unthinkable

Renaissance in Nuclear Power

Custom-Made Genes Redesigning Humans

Technology’s Creatures: Essays on Humanity’s Evolution

Building a Better Brain

Our Past Within Us: The New Field of Archeogenetics Is Illuminating Prehistory

Darwin At Large

The Genetic Frontier

The Biotech Century: the Century of Biology– Red Herring, September 2000

Frankenfoods Revisited: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food

Pharma’s Market

Profile: For Nobel Prizewinner Leon Cooper, Biology and Technology Are Merging


Sex, Sin, and Why We Behave the Way We Do : The Genetic Inferno

Transplant: Disturbing Details of the Early Days of Organ Transplants

Chronic Ailments; the Hard Economics of Healthcare for IT Vendors

Perchance to Dream: Like Sleep for a Wretched Few, a Complete Explanation of the Mechanism of Human Consciousness Still Eludes Us

A Novel Optical Device Could Ultimately Be Used To Treat Neurological Disease

On Our Way to the Technorapture

The Truth Is Out There

Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks

The Persistence of Vision: Freeman Dyson

How the Future Was: Seymour Cray and His Supercomputers Are Part of the Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Cybernaut: Norbert Wiener

The Evolution of Intelligent Computers: Babbage and Others

The Tangled Debate Over who Invented the First Computer

Profile: Danny Hillis

The Digital Utility: Cloud Computing

Entangled Light, Quantum Money: A Breakthrough Explores the Challenges-the Financial Possibilities of-Creating Quantum Networks

Photonic Computing Takes a Quantum Leap

Zen and the Art of Appliances: The Invisible Computer & We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age

Games Companies Play: Matsushita Leadership & Do Lunch or Be Lunch

China’s Breed of Consumer Socialism Grows Even Stranger

Privatizing Terror: Former political prisoner Harry Wu believes that in China, totalitarianism and free markets are not imcompatible

America the Triumphal: Why Not Everyone Will Not Buy the U.S. Version of Free Market Ideology

Empire Net: Manuel Castells – Information, Society, and Culture

American CreationThe Limits of Markets in Visionary Projects (Rescuing Prometheus)

Storyboard: Selling the Telling of Our Lives

Suburbia Lurches Towards Tomorrow Land

The Talk of the Town: You. Rethinking Privacy in an Immodest age

Choose Valhalla for the Posh New Digital_Age Adress

There’s Money To Be Made Applying the Laws of Physics to Free Markets. And Trillion-Dollar Risks Involved.

A World of Money: Globalization Is Diminishing National Governments’ Control of Their Currencies

Basic Instinct: the History of Money

Follow the Money: the Cash Nexus – Niall Fergusson

Market Rules; the Battle Between Government and the Marketplace

Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization

The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus

Peter Drucker, Still Essential
Businessman: The World According to Peter Drucker

Burn Rate: Michael Wolf Torches Those Whom He Met in the Net’s Early Days

Butterfly Economics and Irrational Exuberance: Charting the Markets in the Absence of Perfect Efficiency
Pop Internationalism: Paul Krugman. Forget Economics, Teach Your Kid to Cut Hair

Founding Father: A New Book Describes the Man Who Created Modern Venture Capital

Tales of Venture Capital Glory
Old Money Made New: A Short History of Venture Capitalism

A Surrealist Manifesto: 21st Century’s Robert Reid Profiles the Entrepreneurs Who Wove the Web

There Is No Honor In Cyberspace-Or In Software: Lawrence Lessig & Neal Stephenson

Babyface and Mr Freeze: Larry Ellison & Andy Gove
The Expanding Universe of Cosmology Titles Grows Larger

India’s Space Ambitions Soar

A lunar mission and a reusable launch vehicle are planned.

Power Play
Chasing Nano

Down the Tube; The Invention of Television
Chuck D’s Scientists: A White Scientist Argues That Today’s Cult of Black Athleticism is Part of a Long History of White Racism

The Ends of E-Commerce: How Intelligent Agents Could Transform Customer Service and Privacy

Dealing In Futures: Truth is Scarier Than Science Fiction – Bruce Sterling’s Distraction and Diane Coyle’s The Weightless World
The State of the Global Telecosm
Capitalists of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Post-Industrial Leisure