So good afternoon. My name is Jonathan Zitron. I'm one of the founders of the Berkman Center. And we are so pleased to welcome today author James Glyke, Harvard College 76. So welcome home. Great to see you. And somebody who was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing Collection, something that all of us in one way or another benefited from, has worked over 10 years at the New York Times and has written books that have a kind of Keystone landmark feel to them by title, delivered on by the rest of the book, which include, of course, chaos, making a new science, genius, the life in science of Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton, the information, a history, a theory, a flood, which does make you wonder if this were like a Fibonacci sequence. What would the next title of the book be? He's playing that close to the vest, but maybe it'll be everything. In the meantime, his own New York Times called the information, quote, sexually theoretical, which is a wonderful pair of things to be called. And he's near and dear to the Berkman Center's heart institutionally because it is James who coined the notion of the worldwide web as the patent that never was. And what an amazing bumper sticker-sized observation that contains within it so much information about a choice made on something eminently patentable that wasn't and an association of that choice with its later success. So without any further introduction, please join me in welcoming James Glyde. Thank you so much for that introduction. I should have asked you beforehand. I should also say that we are being webcast. So anything that you say, can, and will be used against you in your later confirmation hearings. And that includes my mispronunciation of James's name. I presume it's the last name, but we're about to find out. I'm going to say Glick. Sorry we didn't discuss it earlier. Thank you, Jonathan. Except for that, it was very nice. And the Fibonacci sequence idea is nice to accept. The information is the end. It's absolutely the end. Now we go back or down or something like that. I'm very happy to be here. I just stumbled on a thing from 1997, an essay about the internet that appeared in the times of London. So this is 15 years ago. And Sir Simon Jenkins wrote, the internet is one more electronic craze that market forces will sooner or later put in its proper context. For the time being, its fanatical proponents need the sympathy and tolerance once extended to Esperantists and radio hands. All this will soon shake down. The internet will struck an hour upon the stage and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media. Well, Sir Simon Jenkins, if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have even been able to look this up. My purpose is not to mock the prediction, because in a way, this is exactly how I feel about Facebook. And there's $90 billion, apparently, that says I'm wrong.  As you all know, those are three different things if we are precise. And sometimes none of them are exactly the right word for what it is we want to talk about. I want to say that we're living simultaneously in two worlds, the world of atoms and the world of bits. The world of atoms being substantial, solid, slow. The world of bits is weightless and frictionless. It's basic tempo being light speed. And my book is meant to tell the story of this world of bits. In the world of atoms, we go outside to play and we feel the warm sun on our face and we smell bread baking in the oven. Right now I'm smelling burritos. Sometimes we call this the real world, as opposed to the virtual world, where we jack in, where time and space are annihilated, where the words friend and like have been hijacked by Facebook. But real world is a silly kind of shorthand, obviously. Both worlds are real. And by the way, the annihilation of time and space is a cliche that sounds modern but actually dates back 150 years to the rise of the electric telegraph. People who think that bit world has only just now popped into existence have been misled. What we are learning very quickly is that the world of atoms and the world of bits play by different rules. I take it that the point of the Berkman Center is that traditions of law and commerce don't always apply in cyberspace. It's also true that the laws of physics don't apply. Or to be more exact, they don't suffice. The thing we call information has its own natural law, its own science, which needed to be discovered and formulated. In physics, a turning point was 1687, the year Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica. An equivalent turning point came in 1948 when Claude Shannon, working at Bell Labs, published a 79-page monograph called the Mathematical Theory of Communication. It was a little more obscure. It appeared first in the Bell System technical journal. But it was a fulcrum around which the world began to turn. Among other things, Shannon proposed a new unit of measure, which he called the bit. A unit, he said, for measuring information, as though there was such a thing. Information was a word being pulled into service to represent the stuff that electrical engineers were transmitting through copper wires. And lately, of course, not just through wires, but through the ether, thanks to radio and any day now television. Of course, we know that information was everywhere, buzzing in the landscape of the early 20th century. Messages and letters, sounds and images, a hodgepodge of related species. But there was no one word for all that stuff until now, until Shannon declared that, for example, one bit of information could be stored by any device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit. And that n such devices can store n bits since the total number of possible states is 2 to the n. And if we all reached into our pockets, how many total devices with two stable positions would we be able to pull out? A lot. To put it another way, before 1948, information was a small and unimportant word, something like news and gossip. It was nothing for scientists to concern themselves with. After that year, it was something new. Mathematicized, reified, measured in bits. In its very first form, Shannon's framework covered coding, error correction, channel capacities, noise. It unified two distinct realms of engineering, analog communication, where messages went via continuous waveforms, as in the telephone system of the day, and digital communication, where messages were strings of discrete symbols. Shannon's theory linked information to uncertainty, to entropy, and to chaos. It made a foundation for our world of information storage and retrieval and information processing. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan remarked, man the food gatherer reappears incongruously as information gatherer. He wrote this an instant too soon. McLuhan considered us citizens of the electric age. He said, we are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age, and we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Of course, his electric age had no email, no web surfing, not even cell phones, much less Facebook and Twitter. McLuhan was mainly watching television. We don't call it the electric age anymore. McLuhan's two contrasted forms of society and experience are the world of atoms and the world of bits. I don't want to suggest though that these are somehow separate parallel universes. As far as I'm concerned, a printed book is part of bit world. We should understand, I think we do understand, that they are embedded in each other. There's just one reality after all. Information is its vital principle, and it always has been. We're finally beginning to understand. Biology is an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. We appreciate that genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. It was no wonder that modern genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, an alphabet, and a code, six billion bits to form a human being. Plenty of physicists go even further and treat the bit as their fundamental particle. John Archibald Wheeler, in the last years of his life, promulgated a slogan, it from bit. He said, information gives rise to every it, every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself. The point is that when photons and electrons and other particles interact, what they are really doing is exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. Wheeler says, what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes, no questions. So one thing we know now about information is that we don't own it. It's not ours. It's not about us. It surrounds us and it precedes us. We are adjusting to a shift in perspective that resembles the demise of the geocentric universe. It should be humbling. The biologist Jacques Monod proposed 40 years ago that we think about an abstract kingdom that rises above the biosphere. Its denizens are ideas. He wrote, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed. They too confuse, recombine, segregate their content. Indeed, they too can evolve and in this evolution, selection must surely play an important role. As you know, he was talking about memes, but this didn't become clear until a few years later when Richard Dawkins invented the word. The meme is the gene's cultural analog. It is a replicator and a propagator, an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, a conspiracy theater theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus. Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beach heads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms. Dawkins would say we are their vehicles and they're enablers. For most of our biological history, their main mode of transmission was the one called word of mouth. Lately, however, they've managed to adhere in solid substance, clay tablets, cave walls, paper sheets. They achieve longevity. Now, they propagate via broadcast towers and digital networks. They are self replicating patterns of information. They live in Monod's abstract kingdom, which we may call the infosphere. Most of the biosphere can't see the infosphere, humming with its ghostly inhabitants, but they aren't ghosts to us, not anymore. We humans live in both worlds at once. It's as though having long coexisted with the unseen, we've begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We're aware of the many species of information. We name them sardonically as though to reassure ourselves that we understand urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air conditioned server farms, but we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears or a fad turns fashion upside down or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, we may well ask, who's in charge? Then, as the role of information grows, it grows to be too much. When I started working on the book, TMI was short for Three Mile Island or Texas Military Institute, which by the way I know because I looked it up in Wikipedia. Now TMI means something else. We have information fatigue and information anxiety. We've met the devil of information overload and his underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link and the PowerPoint presentation. There is a universally recognized metaphor for our current predicament. The word is flood. We feel a sensation of drowning, of information as a rising, churning deluge. One simple statement of the TMI problem is this. The multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind. That was written 800 years ago. By the Dominican friar, Vincent of Beauvais, it was his justification for his life's great project, the Speculum Mayus, a combination of encyclopedia and a history of the world. Facts used to be hard to find. People used to turn to the pages of Whitaker's Almanac published every year in England or the World Almanac in the US to find names and dates and sizes and populations. Lacking the Almanac, they might call on a man or woman of experience behind a desk at a public library. When George Bernard Shaw's wife was dying, he decided he needed the whereabouts of the nearest crematorium. And he turned to the Almanac and the Almanac let him down. He wrote to the editor, I have just found an astonishing omission in Whitaker. As the desired information is just what one goes to your invaluable Almanac for, may I suggest that a list of the 58 crematoria now working in the country and instructions what to do would be a very desirable addition. Shaw took it for granted that facts were to be found in print, even though by then he had a telegraph address and a telephone. Many other people were using the telephone to reach out for information. People realized that it was in their power to know instantly the scores of sporting events that they hadn't witnessed. So many came up with the idea of telephoning the newspaper that the New York Times in 1929 felt compelled to print a front page notice with the headline, don't ask by telephone for World Series scores. Now, the information in real time is considered a birthright. So what do we do when we have everything at last? Daniel Dennett imagined in 1990 just before the internet made this dream possible that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry. Instead of slim books, elegant specialty items marketed to connoisseurs, what if poets could publish online? They might reach not hundreds but millions of readers, almost instantly, not for tens of dollars, but for fractions of pennies. That same year, Sir Charles Chadwick Healy, a publisher, conceived of what he called the English poetry full text database. And four years later, he had produced it, not online, but in four compact discs, 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets, spanning 13 centuries, priced $51,000. Readers and critics had to figure out what to make of this. You wouldn't read it, surely, the way you'd read a book. Maybe you'd read in it or maybe you'd search in it. Anthony Lane reviewed the database for the New Yorker and he described it this way.  But it quickly transpires that the jewels are outnumbered by the clunkers. The flood of bombast, of mediocrity, the sheer unordered mass can wear you down. Not that Lane sounds at all weary. He says, what a steaming heap. Never have I beheld such a magnificent tribute to the powers of human incompetence, and also by the same token to the blessings of human forgetfulness. And he cites, by way of example, a funny self-referential couplet by the utterly forgotten Thomas Freeman, circa 1610. Whoop, whoop, me thinks I hear my reader cry. Here is rhyme dogrel, I confess it, I. By the way, since Lane wrote about him, Thomas Freeman did get an entry in Wikipedia. But the CD-Roms are obviously obsolete. All English poetry is in the network now, or if not all, some approximation thereof, and if not now, then soon. The past folds into the present. Different media have different event horizons. For the written word, say three millennia. For recorded sound, a century and a half. And within these time frames, the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Record companies rummage through their attics to release every scrap of music, rarities, besides bootlegs. For a certain time, collectors or scholars or fans possessed their books and their records. There was a line between what they owned and what they did not. For some, the music they owned or the books or the videos became part of who they were. But that line is fading away. Most of Sophocles plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach's music was unknown to Beethoven, but we have it all, partitas, cantatas, and ringtones. It comes to us instantly or at light speed. It's a symptom of omniscience. It's a mixed blessing, the embarrassment of riches. The information theorists gave us a version of information from which meaning had been excised. They announced that meaning was irrelevant to the engineering problem. For some people, especially social scientists, this mathematical incarnation of information represented a kind of reductionism run wild. So we are constantly reminding ourselves that information is not knowledge. We can pull a device from our pocket and tap into the global collective memory and somehow we don't necessarily feel any smarter. 50 years ago, in 1962, the president of the American Historical Association, Karl Breidenbau, delivered a polemical address warning that human existence was undergoing what he called a great mutation. So sudden and so radical that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia. He lamented the decline of reading, the distancing from nature, which he blamed in part on ugly yellow Kodak boxes and the transistor radio everywhere, and the loss of shared culture. Most of all, for the preservers and recorders of the past, he worried about the new tools and techniques available to scholars. He said that bitch goddess quantification, the data processing machines, and also those frightening projected scanning devices which we are told will read documents and books for us. And he added, notwithstanding the incessant chatter about communication that we hear daily, it has not improved. Actually, it has become more difficult, which I think means that he would not approve of Twitter. I think he was wrong, and I think he would still be wrong. The TMI feeling, the sensation of noise without meaning is certainly real. We know how hard it remains, Google and Wikipedia notwithstanding, to find needles in haystacks and to distinguish the true from the false. No wonder some people feel we've arrived in a hellish world devoid of grace, a world of information glut and gluttony, of bent mirrors and counterfeit texts, malicious blogs, banal messaging incessant chatter. But this isn't the world I see. However we choose to define knowledge, it seems clear enough that we've got more of it and we were able to spread it more widely than ever before. As intensely as we now experience the present in our faces all the time, I think history is more alive than ever and more with us than ever if we care. One of the first people on Twitter was Margaret Atwood, a master of a longer form who you'd think wouldn't condescend to 140-character soundbites. She explained it very simply. Let's just say it's communication and communication is something human beings like to do. We're dealing with a tension between individual knowledge and collective knowledge, between creativity and groupthink. Wikipedia is collective, crowdsourced knowledge at its absolute worst and also at its absolute best. Everyone here knows two things about Wikipedia that it's utterly unreliable and that it's exceedingly useful. When it's wrong, it may be very wrong. When it's not wrong, it may be insipid. And yet the breadth and the detail are astounding and absolutely unprecedented. The same applies to everything Google does and it applies in a different way to the apparently formless mass of bloggers and Twitterers. Groupthink gains sway and yet individuality pokes through again and again. We can accept the mathematical point that information does not imply meaning or knowledge or much less wisdom. And meanwhile, we can find meaning where we can. We're engaging in a project of organizing knowledge, sorting it, filtering it, reviewing it. We need to remind ourselves that this project has been underway for many centuries and it's never gonna end. It is subjective and imperfect and unstable. Thank you. In a pleasing kind of recursion, I couldn't help but look up the Wikipedia entry for Thomas Freeman. And at the end, of course, you are mentioned. Oh no. Seriously? Oh yes. Freeman was mentioned by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker with the four CD-ROMs, et cetera, et cetera. This incident was described by James Glick as an example of how unprepared people were for the World Wide Web to bring all of human nature, literature to the tips of their fingers. Glick mistakenly states that Freeman is not mentioned in Wikipedia, although it's possible that this very page was added as a response to Glick's anecdote. Fabulous. Clearly, we should edit that page now to say, in fact, Glick now has changed the anecdote to account for the existence of the page at which point the page will wink out of existence. So, yes. That blows my mind. So, let's open it up to questions and reactions. I've got plenty, so I can go first, if no one wants to be first, or I can just call on people, which I've been known to do. Yes, sir, and Dan, am I right? We gotta get mics over to people, and feel free to tell us and the world who you are. Of course, that's a good question, and I don't know if I should have said nobody owns information, because that makes for a nice sound bite. And it felt true when I said it, speaking of information as something that exists apart from us humans. But now, on a more immediate level, I'm, to some extent, a great believer, a passionate believer in copyright. I live by copyright. I'm an author. I earn my living from writing books. And I'm a supporter of the American version of copyright law, which is based on the principle that creators need an incentive, which can be given to them by offering them a partial sort of ownership of the form of their expression. The form of their expression being certainly a subset of information. Now we could sort of devolve into arguments about all the tough questions that are arising about copyright. And I have opinions about all of them, but I don't know if you're asking about all of them. But it may also be that as an author, you may have to make choices, or the choices you make about how to assert your copyright can affect how your memes do or don't travel. For what it's worth, I found that having a book available on the web for free with a deep link createable to each individual paragraph means that all those moments that when somebody asks a question, you might say, well, read my book. It says it much more carefully there than I can possibly say now. You could say, here's the link. Click here and you'll see what I think. Where the normal corrals, which feel a little bit 20th century in order to effectuate traditional copyright, make it really hard to do that. It's kind of all or nothing. You buy the book, you read it, or you don't. Okay, let me say two things about that. One thing is, there are two different issues here, I think. One is people often say its authors are motivated, not just by a desire to make money, but by a desire to have people read their stuff. And if they put their stuff online free, more people will read it. And if library books are able to lend them free, sales will rise and so forth. There are many, many versions of this. I don't know to what extent those things are true. That is, I don't think anybody at this point has any idea whether, for me, making my e-book available free for download from every library in the world is gonna make me richer or poorer. I'm really, I'm sort of agnostic about that. What I believe, though, is that at least for a while it ought to be up to the author to decide.  And if I want to be a Luddite about the dissemination of my book, I sort of feel that there's a moral principle there, even apart from the practical principle of encouraging me to write books. Without expressing that at the moment, temporary in American law is 95 years. Okay, that's right. I mean, we can argue endlessly about 95 years. I'm not a fan of 95 years, but don't tell anybody I said that. Just don't tell my fellow authors I said that. But you raised a second point, Jonathan, that I wanna respond to, which is this possibly lovely idea of a hyperlink to every paragraph of my book for easier access or something. And I have to say I'm kind of horrified by that idea.  That would be great for a cookbook. It might be great for the online database of poetry if each link is a poem. But I wanna emphasize that for me, the book is a unit. This is the musician who says the long playing record starts with dropping this whole shuffle play thing. Well, and do you want excerpts of Beethoven's 9th? You know, 22nd excerpts, the best of? It's Twitter for Beethoven. Well, yes and no. I mean, I would say even Twitter, Twitter, I'll defend Twitter and say that Twitter is meant to be 140 characters. That is the work. That's the work. And it's a restricted form, but there are people who are really becoming masters of it. So if you could have your way, your book would be better as a scroll rather than a codex. No codex is fine. Because that would compel people to read it straight through. Codex is fine. I'm not trying to compel people, but I'm trying to tell people that in my opinion they will get a better experience if they read it from beginning to end. Somebody actually asked me when I started going around talking about the book, said, is your book intended to be read here and there or is one supposed to read it from start to finish? And well, there are books I suppose that you can dip in and out of, but I really would like to say that a reason I believe in the future of the book as a form is that some authors use the length to create a structure that is not apparent unless you read the whole book. There are things in my book that echo other things and that will not make sense.  You're not sounding inappropriately pretentious. Once you... Once you... I hope I'm not sounding inappropriately snarky. And I'm also not trying to assert control over the reader. I mean, once you buy the book, do what you want with it. Cut it up into little pieces. Theodore Holm Nelson, who is often credited as the inventor of hypertext, although his proposed hypertext system did not end up the precursor to the World Wide Web we have today because it only has... He has two-way links. The web has one-way links. He recently wrote a book for which the chapters are in such odd order. He then gives you a separate map that says you should start with chapter two, then read chapter five twice, then go back to chapter one. He has a suggestion, but that's his choice to say... That's right. And the man who invented hyperlinks might well be... I'm sure that new forms of art are gonna emerge that make use of hyperlinks. A lot of you may remember there was a big flurry of, I'm sure you remember, Jonathan, big flurry of kind of literary interest in the form of hypertext about 10 years ago. Who are some of the writers? Some very good fiction writers got involved with it. And I think it's fair to say, it's premature to say, but in my opinion, it's fair to say that that didn't amount to much. Sort of the choose your own adventure was the harbinger of that, a form of hypertext and reading that book. Maybe the technology wasn't ready for people to come up with good works of literature in the form of hypertext. Now, I also wanna say, I really think this is an important point. It came up, it comes up, I should say, in connection with programs like Google's book search program, because if you are going to authorize somebody, not Google apparently, but maybe some kind of digital library to put books online, do you wanna have hyperlinks in them? The way there are hyperlinks in most online newspapers now, you're reading along in the newspaper and suddenly some phrase is blue. And what is that phrase and why is it blue? I don't want hyperlinks in my books added after the fact, except for the strictly limited cases of links to end notes. End notes, sir, that's an anachronistic form. End notes, that's something that e-books can do better than physical books, but I don't want when I make a reference to Claude Shannon and information theory, a link certainly not to the Wikipedia article about it, but even to Claude Shannon's book about it. No, I want, again, maybe it's just precious of me, but I would like people to have the experience of reading the thing in order. But this is very interesting because part of the point of your book is that information is something that can repose in a medium, like within a book there's information, but it's obviously also a relationship between a brain and or a mind and that book. And that the act of a mind reading something, I don't know, I think of people encounter Shakespeare in high school, the number of footnotes added after the fact to explain to them that this actually means that, and when it looks like this, we really mean, I mean, because the language has shifted, the culture has shifted, so you could see, your first objection was to incoming hyperlinks being able to unduly segment the work. This is a very different objection. This is outgoing hyperlinks that let the mind encountering the book choose how much to take a detour and learn more about something. And I just remember, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich not long ago, and it had a kind of throwaway reference to the Night of the Long Knives, which not having been reading the newspapers during the 40s, or the 30s, I didn't know what the Night of the Long Knives was. And being able to actually look it up, and I think it was Wikipedia that filled me in a little bit.  That's fine, we have to keep, and of course it's very easy to do that now on your, I don't want to name a brand of e-book. And I do that all the time. I mean, I'm not gonna deny that I do it, but we should keep in mind that somebody, whoever is, if the hyperlinks are embedded in the text, somebody is making choices about where they're going. There's a curator who's doing it, either the author or someone who follows. So you're by default going to Night of the Long Knives on Wikipedia or wherever. Probably on Google, and then it sends me to Wikipedia. That's right, which, as I said, is a mixed blessing, because you're settling for the collective wisdom about the Night of the Long Knives. But even worse would be if somebody decided that the word knives, they're needed, a reference to the history of cutting materials. They're choices made. Now, again, we can imagine a world where authors take the trouble to do that, helpfully. But there is that dilemma as an author where you're figuring out who is my audience? And for academics, it can be very easy. The audience are the five other people who are going to read this book. And you can just write them a letter, really, in the form of a book. But for somebody writing for a mass audience, there must be trade-offs all the time about how long do I go into this and lose the people that know it versus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I have just curious, a quick poll. How many people when watching television, its own form of text, find themselves in the midst of enjoying the program, looking something up online to explicate? How many people? And how many people are slightly guilty about doing it when they do? Oh, it's just me. I'm the only one who feels guilty. Because I don't feel guilty about it. Really? I don't think anybody has to feel guilty about anything. That's how, that's how laid-back. You know, anything in this, we consume information the way we learn to consume it, the way we choose to consume it. And I think we all waste time browsing through stuff that's trivial.  I know I do. And if we start to feel bad about that, then we know or we should be able to learn how to adapt and find balance again. And I think that means sitting down with long books or listening to long pieces of music in a quiet room without a magazine in front of you. But not because, not out of a feeling of guilt, I don't think. I try not, in any of my writing, to tell people what they ought to do. And that refines your too much information point. Because too much information can mean there's just so much out there, I feel paralyzed. But to the extent that it's pulled, you can go out and graze on it whenever you want. It's great. If you have a question on the RFK assassination, anyone in this room can bring up the actual video of the ballroom in the California Hotel within five seconds and watch it. It's amazing and doesn't feel overwhelming. Whereas it's the push part, your agenda is getting set by this number of Facebook invitations to which you have to respond. This set of reading lists, all that kind of stuff, which even sounded like the 17th century fellow you mentioned who was complaining there were too many books. Couldn't read them all. Live Nets. Yes. Google them. Yes. And tell us who you are. Thanks, yeah. I'm Steve Chapman. I work in the law library and a number of us are in the room that work in digital libraries. And I love hearing this conversation because it helps us in our traditional role as disseminators of information or any kind of produced works. We librarians are struggling with discriminating between the presentation and versions that would display the author's intent as perhaps differentiated from a reader's experience. And so we're gonna have a conference at Schlesinger soon about marginalia and championing that. And so from the author's perspective, what I would love to have is some way that we would be encoding information in the enterprise of moving things between the author and reader. And we have relationships of author to reader, of reader to reader, a reader to author. And we can make these distinctions more explicit than we've been able to in the past. But it's something that we wrestle with. I mean, on a political level, do we privilege the reader over the author, the author over the reader? And what you're representing so well is what I'd expect you to represent, which is the author's perspective and this interchange of those. Okay, but let me add this. And maybe I won't be able to convince you, but I would like to say that as a reader, I want you first and foremost to privilege, as you say, the author's intent. Whatever it is that I want to read, I want to at least have the opportunity of reading it the way it was written without the distractions of marginalia. Now, marginalia are fine. I don't object to that as an extra vehicle. And if you're in the mood to see what everybody else has written in the margins of some book or which passages they have highlighted, that's fine. But I have to say that it is as a reader that I don't want that experience to be primary. I want to, when I pick up a novel, I don't want to see what other people have highlighted. I want to read it absolutely fresh. There was a question here. Hi, my name is Judith Donoth. I'm a fellow at the Berkman Center. But I think it's also important, and I think we live in a good time for doing this, for separating out the physical form that ideas are being presented in and what is sort of the natural form of the way they're done. I think very few people would argue if you had a best-selling fiction writer here who said, of course, my book gets read through. It's a spellbinder and this is how it's supposed to be. When I sat down with your book, I tend to read books in chunks and all over the place and it was daunting and I thought, well, I'll dip in here. I did read it through from cover to cover, but I think that has a lot very much to do with your style of writing, which is, I think, owes a lot more almost to fictional narrative than to the way a lot of nonfiction books are written today. It was far easier to read straight through than I had expected upon looking at it and its daunting size. And so I think a lot of this argument is really about the emergence of multiple long-form texts because I think there are many books that really, really would be enhanced with this idea of hypertext or being able to be read. Have you read The Dictionary of the Khazars? No. It's the one fiction book that really was designed to be read as that type of skipping around narrative where it's written as what looks like it could be a series of encyclopedia entries. There's no entry point into it, but you have to keep looking things up and it eventually turns into a novel as you read it, but most fiction books aren't like that. And so I think the importance is for the author to know what kind of book they are writing because I think there are many authors who've struggled a lot with the linearity of books and who are gonna be greatly liberated with the ability to write books that are in hypertext to say, here's this idea and it branches in all these different places and I can let you move around in it, I think is one piece of it, but it's a separate issue, I think, from that fear of your audience escaping into this infinite world of Google and stuff and maybe coming back a week later, which is what happens when you have links that go outside, but again, that's an interface issue because what you really want is a e-book that pops up those little pieces and doesn't let you escape. So it's not so much in the writing form, it's in the form of the medium and I think what we're seeing in the next few years is how these multiple different ways of both writing and dealing with hypertext and then dealing with what the interface for long form should be emerging, but we're just at the beginning of that. I think that's true. I think that was very nicely put and thank you and it's true that people use the form in different ways and some people write books that are with which there is no particular advantage to reading them through and sometimes that's because they just aren't very good but other times that's intentional and it's fine. This is maybe a digression but I read one of my favorite books of recent years is by Clive James. Somebody helped me come up with the title. It's a collection of biographical sketches of 20th century figures. Okay, Clive James's last book. You hear clacking. Yes, so do I. It's two words. Yes, thank you. Cultural amnesia. All right, the form of the book is sketches of 20th century figures from politics and the arts. Sketches of maybe five or six pages each. The length is very consistent and they are in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order can't possibly be, it's as if he is announcing that this is a work of reference and you're not meant to read it straight through because those people, I don't need to explain, it's an arbitrary ordering scheme and yet I did read it from start to finish and I read it, I was left with the sense that despite the arbitrariness, I mean he couldn't have written it in alphabetical order, it made sense that way. It's not just a work of reference, it's not at all a work of reference, you're not meant to dip into it. On the other hand, I won't pretend that I read all of them and by the way, I should have said, I think it goes without saying that when you read my book, you're allowed to skip the boring parts. Other questions over here? Hi, I'm Espin Anderson, I'm a visiting scholar at CISR at MIT. I'm currently working on a collection of papers from various people discussing the singularity, which is, and the notion that computers at some point will be smarter than us and I'm sort of seeing a path forward towards that where more and more of the information we're relating to is so big, it's so much of it that the only way we can get at it is through some sort of computer mediated interface. I have a friend in Ireland who walks around and takes 5,000 pictures every day and that goes into a computer and he can sort of look up everything he's had for dinner the last six years. But he can't browse those pictures, he can only get at it through search. And I'm sort of wondering, how do you feel about that and think about this increasing flood of information and our mediated interface to it? Where do you see that going? And by the way, will computers eventually sort of do that for us? I've decided that I can't address a question about the singularity without quoting William Gibson, who calls it the geek rapture. I kind of feel, yeah, yes, I believe in the singularity and it's all we're already in it, it's already happening, it's already happened. And I don't especially worry about it. What you say is very true, it's sort of the point that the way we, you're describing I think a sort of special case of the general fact that the way we are interacting with information in the world is dramatically mediated by technology. But it has been for a very long time, it's just more and more. And I think just to worry that we're dependent on the technology and therefore becoming less human, well I don't, that worry doesn't bother me. I'm, yes, we are becoming cyborgs, let's face it. The fact that everybody, that many people in this room had to tap away to help my memory lapse on the title of my favorite book of Clive James is, well, that's okay. Without the mediation of technology, we wouldn't have had an answer, it changes things, it's different. Our relationship to our photographs is very different and I'm at the age where I'm in the middle, I have a lot of old photographs that I suppose you would say because I can't search, I can only look at the old fashioned way by digging through the piles and then reality is I have not looked at those photographs since they were taken, they're in envelopes someplace I don't even know where. And the ones that I have digitally are the ones that are accessible to me even though they're only accessible through search. That's okay, we'll deal. Well, let me try to push you a little more on that question and it bears a little bit just being on law school territory. Often the question asked in a classroom like this is, well, given if all you say is true, what then? What do we need to do or not do or is there some policy that's called for? I think we're doing it, we are doing it. We are finding our way through a very unstable situation and we are looking for new ways to balance something that has always been out of balance. I mean, that's sort of the, I think I've come to this Pollyanna-ish sounding view of things from writing this book where I learned so much about the history of, through about times during the history of the technologies of information when people felt comparable forms of being out of balance. I mean, it's what McLuhan was expressing in that quote. It's what, I quote Bertolt Brecht somewhere in my book. Don't look it up right the second way till later. At the dawn of the age of radio. Brecht was fascinated by radio. You can see why he would be working in an art form where his audiences were about this size suddenly being able to think about broadcasting to the millions. But he was also very, he was pressured about it and he said things about the unbalance between speaker and listener that apply today to Twitter in the opposite director. But the kind of concern you could see with a form of mass communication that consumed the theorists of the electric world as you put it in the 20th century would be its use for demagoguery, for pushing one idea out and squelching others because of the power of that rare broadcast tower. I think in the event it turned out a little differently that we ended up with most broadcast towers in the American context at least being the most anodyne that they were not particularly radical unless you saw the status quo itself as radical because it was reinforcing of that. But they tended to be on the one hand on the other and you know the kind of, if you just listen to the cadence of a Dan Rather or a Walter Cronkite when they were on camera it was all very a little bit so horrific. Like, you know, there's some concerning news and some human interest. Oh well, had my concern. He'll let me know when I should actually run. And a concern you could see coming in this cybernetic present and future is one in which partially as part of the quest to offer us the most wonderful word relevant information to our searches. And as we see on almost every search engine there's no such answer anymore to what is the response on a Bing or Google search for X. It is what is your response tailored to you and your interests. That's not too far removed from as we use these computer mediated lenses to view the world, we get answers tailored to us we are just mimetic processing units and you could see the number of natural interactions dropping which is to say interactions in which you have a kind of encounter with a piece of information or a person where they're not trying to particularly get you to buy something that even they don't believe in that that becomes rarer and rarer and more and more often every time you turn to how for advice what you're getting is something that may be as banal a goal as to sell you lifesavers or to have a goal of persuading you of something that may or may not have a truth value. And if that's the case you could see your world being one in which knowing what is true seems much more difficult doesn't it? Yes, yes it does. And that's our world. My view is there's only one wrong thing to say in all of these areas and that is that if we work hard enough if we get the computer science right if we discover the correct algorithms we can find an ideal balance. That is let's say a perfect search engine. Right now we know that if Google gives everybody the same response to a search doesn't make use of any personal information about us those responses have to be flawed because sometimes you're looking for night of the long knives and sometimes you're actually looking for cutlery. Correct, the same problem of writing a book for a broad audience. Right. And so it might be tempting to think that when Google gets better and better about knowing who we are and what we looked for yesterday then finally the search results are gonna be perfect they are not gonna be perfect because in the next breath you will ask what about serendipity? What about the happy accidents? What about the times even I didn't know what I was looking for? Or more trivially what about the times when I just yesterday I was looking for auto parts and that does not mean that for the rest of the week Amazon should be trying to sell me books about auto repair. Yes. In the same way there is no perfect answer to the question of whether it's best to have a single carefully controlled voices broadcasting to the millions or complete freedom for everybody to just broadcast to everybody else. We need a mixture of the scales. I mean you're absolutely right that in this country during the era when the electronic broadcast media were a few TV stations, few big newspapers for that matter they tended to be anodyne and not as harmful as George Orwell might have thought but in countries where the media are state owned and tightly controlled you know what the countries I'm talking about and where governments are at this moment trying to exert control over cyberspace. I don't think anodyne is gonna be the appropriate word. I mean I think we're right to worry about that. We get a kind of balance to centralize to media by doing things like having Twitter where there are a billion voices but and of course as soon as you do that you have a billion voices most of which the overwhelming majority of which are rubbish and the large majority of which are even offensive. So in what sort of era do you expect madness to spread, hoaxes to spread, misinformation to spread more efficiently? This new era of where everybody can talk very freely or the old era where you had the New York Times and you had CBS News or the older era where you had I don't know what the authority of the academy. I will answer my own question and say both, either way, it's strange to me that in our time when people have access to facts there are so many people who believe things that I know to be absolutely nutty that the president of the United States was not born in the United States. But part of that is you're right that you could attribute some of it to just a natural phenomenon of people reading whatever they click kind of thing.  You're like, well, it has a lot of views. I do like that. Part of it is. But part of it may be the next stage is if I want to write a check and in doing so influence belief. Absolutely. The way to do that before was you run commercials or something and this is talk about a out of context statistic but Larry Lessig just last weekend was pointing out I guess he just crunched the numbers or looked it up. 80% of super PAC spending in this election so far have been from 189 Americans. So fewer than 200 people have been responsible for tens and tens of millions of dollars of spending which clearly had an impact. Again, that's mostly ads. You could see if you had $20 million to spend on getting a belief out there you would be trying to be doing it in a much more subtle and individualized way for which I don't know that the gatekeepers who can make that happen have the kind of rectitude and independent identity that a CBS news believing in the church state separation between new editorial and publishing. I don't know how much those gatekeepers even subscribed to that. Well, I think you're making the point that even though we've lived through a period of a couple of decades when before our eyes we could see the rise of a very democratic and free flowing form of communication. Yes. We must not be blind to the fact that there are as much now perhaps more now than ever forces that exert control over the flow of information by virtue of state power or economic power. And when you look at when you ask why so many people enjoy the in my view lunatic view that global warming is either not happening or not man made or race it but they enjoy it. They enjoy it. That seems weird. And there are two things to be said about that. One is there's this kind of dynamic of finding out other people who like your conspiracy theories that you can see by following some of the nuttiness on Twitter. But it is also the case that there are powerful economic interests who encourage that kind of thing and deliberately spread misinformation in that particular area. Yes. I don't know. I mean there are other kinds of misinformation that spread where I don't have any personal conspiracy theory about economic forces. I don't know. I thought the whole YQK episode of 12 years ago was an example of a kind of mass hysteria. Unless it was the very hysteria that saved us. And I don't. Well there aren't. Well seriously there are a lot of people who say it was the hysteria that saved us and that I am wrong. A lot of people believe I am wrong. That there was a very real problem and it was a good thing that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on it and that there was a certain amount of panic. Because otherwise I don't believe that's true. But in any case I haven't been able to figure out who benefited from the spread of that hysteria. I think it just happened. Yes. Yes it's funny too there was often in that era quotes from the BU Center for Millennial Studies. And I just wonder like what are they doing now? Do they just have like the next 950 years off? Like what do they do anyway? Yes sir. Let's get a mic over to make sure it's on the. Thank you. So I'm Chris Daly and I'm happy to say that Jim Glick and I were classmates in the Harvard undergraduate class of 1976 and delighted to see you again. I now teach at Boston University, not in the Millennial Studies Department. I believe. But I do teach. Ten year takes on a new meaning there. I do teach about the history of communications and journalism and this sort of thing. And Jim I want to thank you for a very elegant and I'm sure deliberately low tech presentation today as a real treat to be in the presence of a thinking person thinking. So thank you for that. Thank you Chris. But I want to ask you about something that you mentioned in your book. You quote approvingly from a John Archibald Wheeler his phrase it from bit. I think indicating that the physical organization of that atomic based world is a reflection of information about the relationships between things. But what I wondered is it, is this a symmetrical kind of a statement? I mean is it work in reverse? It seems that most of the bits that in other words the things we or the knowledge that exists is knowledge about something, right? So that you know we have like a whole body of knowledge about geology but it exists only because there are actual rocks, right? So this is a two way flow. No geology without rocks. Right, in other words. Whereas the rocks presumably predated the geology. Right, and those relationships predated, right? So is this a two way flow is what I'm getting at? The relationship between the atoms and the bits. I think it is. I mean I think I tried to say that the world of atoms and the world of bits are embedded one in the other. It's true, as you say, it's almost true that I quote Wheeler approvingly. I quote him kind of admiringly and hopefully. And that is he's expressing something that seems a little bit mystical to me. And it's above my. That's what caught my eye. It's above my pay grade, you know. I'm not a theoretical physicist and at some point I have to just be a science reporter and report on what other people are saying and try to understand it as well as I can. The role of information theory in modern theoretical physics is incredibly interesting and I try to cover it to some extent in the book in a tentative way. Quantum theory even apart from quantum information theory is it seems to me in a kind of a state of misunderstanding. I mean I have a sense that quantum theorists revel in the obscurity of their subject and the mystery of their subject. They do and they don't simultaneously. Well yes, they love making that kind of joke. And it's all the more interesting when you add information into the mix because then, well, I can't answer your question except to say yes, I think so. But there is a real question in there which is which is a phenomenon of the other or they intertwined phenomenon. I exist therefore I am a piece of data by my mere existence but you would also think that data could be independent of that and then there's like the number two which doesn't point to anything except two. So I don't know what to make of that. This lecture brought to you by the number two and the quantum state strange. You know it's interesting just to continue your point it's interesting to look in Wikipedia and figure out which numbers have their own Wikipedia entries. You'd be surprised. You can't have one for everyone. Well there are a lot and actually this becomes a real issue for a modern branch of information theory, algorithmic information theory where you start to worry about the paradoxes. One of the paradoxes, a paradox you can express is what is the smallest non-interesting number? Interesting number. The smallest number about which there's really nothing that you'd wanna say. You can see what the paradox is right away, right? That whatever that number is. The number right below it is gonna be. Well whatever that number is it's interesting because it's the smallest non-interesting number. It is, it's Gertl's theorem applied to Wikipedia. Yeah it is, okay. Well, last question. We started by asking you somewhat playfully about your next work, your next cluster of thoughts when you're taking and you hinted only that it's going to be very different than what has come before perhaps in format. We've talked a lot about format but maybe in substance too. Is there anything more you wanna say about what you're thinking about? Jonathan? No. There really isn't and I'm mindful of the fact that not only do we have the people here in the real world listening to me that there are people in a virtual world and honestly I have a kind of fuzzy idea that I'm toying with but it's not firm enough. If I talk about it it'll disappear. We look forward to it and we have every certainty that it is not non-interesting. Please join me in thanking James Slythe. Thank you all very much. Thank you.


I have suffered this day until I want to lay my face down against the hem of his garment and wait in the dust for him to pick me up. I shall never be able to do it myself and how he is going to do it I can't see, but he will. That dinner party last night was bad enough, but today's been worse. I didn't sleep until long after daylight and then Jane came in before eight o'clock with a letter for me that looked like a state document. I felt in my trembling bones that it was some sort of summons affair from Judge Wade and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and a single egg before I tried to read it. Incidental to my bath and dressing I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove that I was in love, but exactly with whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work and then I took up the Judge's letter, which also was work and more of it. He started at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of the tuberculosis girl and I cried over the pages of her as if she had been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the Judge's bouquet strewn appreciation of him, but I didn't want him as bad as I had the day before when I read his own new and old letters and cried over his old photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the Judge manages the juries with. He be apt to use it on a woman and she wouldn't find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad. Still, when he began on me at page sixteen, I felt a little better, although I didn't know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page twenty. What I am is just a poor, foolish woman who has a lot more heart than she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth. I'm not any star in a rose-colored sky and I don't want to inspire anybody. It's too heavy an undertaking. I want to be a healthy, happy woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want to marry a thin man and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to want me to be as large as Aunt Betty, but not let me. An inspiration couldn't be fat and I'm always in danger from hotcakes and chicken gravy. However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones from mental and physical exercise.  It's up in my throat and I seem always to be swallowing it the last few days. All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into a sky rocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph and it always upsets my nerves. I was just about to begin to cry again over the last words of the judge when the only bright spot in the day so far suddenly happened. Pat Vuford ran in with the pinkest cheeks and the brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the dance. She was in an awful hurry. Mollie, dear, she said with her words literally falling over themselves. Tom says you would give us some of your dinner leftovers to take for lunch in the car, for we are going to take a run down to Hedgeland to see some awfully fine cattle he has heard will be in the market there. I don't want to ask mother in case you won't let me go and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said I was to come to you and you would understand and arrange it all quickly. He sent his love in all sorts of other messages. Isn't he fond of a joke? And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket and kissed and laughed again for goodbye. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes and also deserted. It's a very good thing for a woman's conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom's deflection. Anyway, I don't know when I was ever so glad to see anybody as I was when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door. A woman who has proved to her own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to other women. I needed a tonic badly this morning and I got it. Well, from all my long experience, Mollie, she said as she seated herself and began to hem a teak lot with long, steady stabs. Husbands are just like the stick of candy in different jars. They may look a little different, but they all taste alike and you soon get tired of them. In two months, you won't know the difference in being married to Alfred Bennett and Mr. Carter. And you'll have to go on living with him maybe 50 years. Luck doesn't strike twice in the same place and you can't count on losing two husbands. Alfred's father was Mr. Johnson's first cousin and had more crotchets and worse. He had silent spells that lasted a week and altogether gave his family a bad time of it. Alfred looks very much like him. Mrs. Johnson, I said after a minute's silence while I had decided whether or not I had better tell her all about it. If a woman's in love with her husband you can't trust her to keep a secret. But I decided to try Mrs. Johnson. I really am not engaged exactly to Alfred Bennett. Though I suppose he thinks so by now if he has got the answer to that telegram, but something has made me think about Judge Wayne. That is, what do you think of him, Mrs. Johnson? I concluded in the most pitifully perplexed tone of voice. All alike, Molly. All as much as peas in a pod. All except John Moore, who's the only exception in all the male tribe I ever met. His marrying once was just accidental and must be forgiven him. She fell in love with him while he was attending her when she had typhoid, when his back was turned as it were, and it was simple kindness in him that made him marry her when he found out how it was with the poor thing. There's not a woman in this town who could marry that wouldn't marry him at the drop of his hat. But thank goodness that hat will never drop, and I'll have one sensible man to comfort and doctor me down in my old age. Now just look at that. Mr. Johnson's come home here in the middle of the morning, and I'll have to get that old paper I hunted out of his desk for him last night. I wonder how he came to forget it. It's funny how Mrs. Johnson always knows what Mr. Johnson wants before he knows himself and gets it before he asks for it. As she went out of the gate, the postman came in, and at the sight of another letter, my heart slunk off into my slippers, and my brain seemed about to back up in a corner and refused to work. In a flash, it came to me that men oughtn't to write letters to women very much. They really don't plow deep enough. They just irritate the topsoil. I took this missive from Alfred, counted all the 15 pages, put it out of sight under a book, looked out of the window, and saw Mr. Johnson shoot off down the street by Mrs. Johnson. Saw the doctor's car go chugging hurriedly in the garage, and then my spirit turned itself to the wall and refused to be comforted. I tried my best, but failed to respond to my own remonstrances with myself, and tears were slowly gathering in a cloud of gloom, when a blue gingham romper-clad sunbeam burst into the room.  He exclaimed, with his eyes dancing and a curl standing straight up on top of his head, as it has a habit of doing when he is most excited. You can't take nothing but them, because I'm going to put in a rope to tie the whale with when I catch him, and it'll take up all the rest of the room. Get him quick. Yes, lover, I'll get them for you. But tell Molly where it is you are going to sail off with her in that trunk of hers. I asked, dropping into the game as I had always done with him, no matter what game of my own pressed when he called. On the ocean, where the boats go cross and run right over a whale, don't you remember you showed me them pictures of spout whales in a book, Molly? Father says they come right up by the ship, and you can hear him shoot water, and maybe an iceberg, too. Which do you want to catch most, Molly, an iceberg or a whale? His eager eyes demanded instant decision on my part of the nature of capture I preferred. My mind quickly reverted to those two ponderous and intense epistles I had got within the hour, and I lay back in my chair and laughed until I felt almost merry. The iceberg, Billy, every time I said it last. I just can't manage whales, especially if they are ardent, which word means intense. I like icebergs, or think I should if I could catch one. I don't believe you could, Molly, but maybe Father will let you put a rope and a long hook in his trunk to try with if your clothes go into mine. His is the heap the biggest anyway, and Nurse Tilly said he ought to put my things in his, but I cried, and then he went upstairs and got out that little one for me. Come and see him. What do you mean, Billy? I asked, while a sudden fear shot all over me like lightning.  No, I'm not playing, Molly, he exclaimed excitedly. Me and you and Father is going across the ocean for a long, long time away from here. Father asked me about it this morning, and I told him all right, and you could come with us if you was good. He said couldn't I go without you if you was busy and couldn't come, and I told him you would put things down and come if I said so. Won't you, Molly? It won't be no fun without you, and you'd cry all by yourself with me gone. His little face was all drawn up with anxiety and sympathy at my lonely estate with him out of it, and a cry rose up from my heart with a kind of primitive savagery at what I felt was coming down upon me. Without waiting to take him with me, or think, or do anything but feel deadly savage anger, I hurried across the garden and into Dr. Moore's surgery, for he was just taking off his gloves and dustcoat. What do you mean, John Moore, by daring, daring to think, you can go and take Billy away from me, I demanded, looking at him with what must have been such fear and madness in my face that he was startled as he came close to the table against which I leaned. His face had grown white and quiet at my attack, and he waited to answer for a long, horrible minute that pulled me apart like one of those inquisition machines they used to torture women with when they didn't know any better modern way to do it. I didn't know Bill would tell you so soon, Mrs. Molly, he said at last gently, looking past me out of the window into the garden. I was coming over just as soon as I got back from this call to talk with you about it, even if it did seem to intrude Bill's and my affairs into a day that ought to be all yours to be happy in. But Bill, you see, is no respecter of other people's happy days if he wants them in his. Billy's happy days are mine, and mine are his, and he has the heart not to leave me out even if you would have him, I exclaimed, a sob gathering in my heart at the thought that my little lover hadn't even taken in a situation that would separate him from me across an ocean. Bill is too young to understand when he is being bereaved, Molly, he said, and still he didn't look at me. I have been appointed a delegate to attend the Centennial Congress in Paris the middle of next month, and somehow I feel a bit run down lately, and I thought I would take the little chap and have a Wunderjar. You won't need him now, Mrs. Molly, and I couldn't go without him, could I? The sadness in his voice would have killed me if I hadn't let it madden me instead. Won't need Billy anymore, I exclaimed, with a rage that made my voice literally scorch past my lips. Was there ever a minute in his life that I haven't needed Billy?  You are cruel, cruel, and I have always known it, cold and cruel like all other men who don't care how they wring the lifeblood out of women's hearts and are willing to use their children to do it with. Even the law doesn't help us poor helpless creatures, and you can take our children and go with them to the ends of the earth and leave us suffering. I've gone on and believed that you were not like what the women say all men are, and that you cared whether you hurt people or not, but now I see that you are just the same, and you'll take my baby away if you want to, and I can do nothing to prevent it, nothing in the wide world. I'm completely and absolutely helpless.  When that awful word, the worst word that a woman can use to a man left my lips, a flame shot up into his eyes that I thought would burn me up, but in a half-second it was extinguished by the strangest thing in the world for the situation, a perfect flood of mirth. He sat down in his chair and shook all over with his head in his hands until I saw the tears creep through his fingers. I had calmed down now so suddenly that I was about to begin to cry in good earnest when he wiped his eyes and said with a low laugh in his throat. The case is yours, Molly, settled out of court, and the possession nine points of the law clause works in some cases for a woman against a man. Generally speaking, anyway, the pup belongs to the man who can whistle him down, and you can whistle Bill from me any day. I'm just his father, and what I think or want doesn't matter. You have better take him and keep him. I intend to, I answered haughtily, uncertain as to whether I have better give in and be agreeable or stay prepared to cry in case there was further argument. But suddenly a strange diffidence came into his eyes and he looked away from me as he said in queer, hesitating words. You see, Mrs. Molly, I thought from now on, your life wouldn't exactly have a place for Bill. Have you considered that you have trained him to demand you all the time and all of you? How would you manage Bill and other claims? And if there is a contagious thing in the world, it is embarrassment. I never felt anything worse in all my life than the shame that swept over me in a great hot wave when that look came into his eyes and made me realize just exactly what I had been saying to him about what and how I had said it. I stood perfectly still, shook all over like a leaf, and wondered if I would ever be able to raise my eyes from the ground. A dizzy, nauseated feeling for myself rose up in me against myself and I was just about to turn on my heels and leave him. I hoped forever when he came over and laid his hand on my shoulder. Molly, he said in a voice that might have come down from heaven on dove's wings. You can't for a moment think or feel that I don't realize and appreciate what you have been to the motherless little chap. And for life I am yours at command as he is. I really thought it would be a relief to you to have him taken away from you for a little while just now and I still think it is best, but not unless you consent. You shall have him back whenever you are ready for him and at all times both he and I are at your service to the whole of our kingdoms. Just think the matter over, won't you, and decide what you want me to do. Something in me died forever, I think, when he spoke to me like that. He's not like other men and there aren't any other men on earth but him. All the rest are just nowhere and I'm not anything myself. There's no excuse for my living and I wish I wasn't so healthy and likely to go on doing it. It was all over and there was nothing left for me to live for and before I could stop myself I buried my face in my hands. Billy asked me to go with him on this awful whale hunt. I sobbed out to comfort myself with the thought that somebody did care for me regardless of just how I was further embarrassing and complicating myself in the affairs of the two men I thought I owned and was now finding out that I had to give up. I wish I had been looking at him for I felt him start but he said in his big friendly voice that it's so much and never enough for me. Well, why not you and Alfred come along and make a family party if that's what suits Bill, the boss? If men would just make an end of women's hearts in a business-like way, it would be so much kinder of them. Why do they prefer to use dull weapons that mash the life out slowly? Everything is at an end for me tonight and that blow did it. It was a horrible, cruel thing for him to say to me. I know now that I have been in love with John Moore for longer than I can tell and that I'll never love anybody else and that also I have offered myself to him and have had to be refused at least twice a day for a year.  Of course, he must suspect how I feel about him for two people couldn't both be so ignorant as not to see such an enormous thing as my love for him is and I was the blind one but he must never, never know that I ever realized it for he is so good that it would distress him. I must go on in my foolish way with him until I can get away. I'll tell him I'm sorry I was so indignant tonight and say that it will be fine for him to take my Billy away from me with him. I must smile at the idea of having my very soul amputated, insist that it was the only thing to do and pack up the little soul in a cabin trunk with a smile. Just smile, that is all. Life demands smiles from a woman even if she must crush their perfume from her own heart and she generally has them ready. Oh Molly, Molly, is it for this you came into the world twice to give yourself without love? What difference does it make that your arms are strong and white if they can't clasp him? Why are your eyes blue pools of love if they are not for his questioning? Yes, I know God is very tender with a woman and I think he understands. So if she crept very close to him and caught at his sleeve to steady herself, he would be kind to her until she had the courage to go on her own steep way. Please God, let him never find out for it would hurt him to have hurt me. End of leaf seven, recorded by Marianne Spiegel, July 18th, 2009. Leaf eight of the melting of Molly. This is a LibriFox recording or LibriFox recordings are under public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriFox.org. Recording by Shilifa Malachem. The melting of Molly by Mariah Thumpson Davis. Leaf eight, melted. Some days are like the miracle flowers that open in the garden from plants you didn't expect to bloom at all. I might have been born, lived and died without having this one come into my life and now that I have had it, I don't know how to write it, except in the crimson of blood, the blue of flame, the gold of glory and a tint of light green would well express the part I have played. But it is all over at last. And Rose Clinton was the unfolding of the first hour petal. And I got a glimpse of a heart of gold that I feel dumb with worship to think of. She's God's own good woman and he made her what she is. I wish I could have born her or she me and the tenderness of her arms was a sacrament. We two women just stood aside with lies, artifices and concealments and let our own hearts do the talking. She said, she had come because she felt that if she talked with me, I might be better able to understand Alfred when he came and that she had seen that the judge was very determined and she thoroughly recognized his fault of character. We stopped there while I gave her the document to read. I suppose it was dishonorable, but I needed a protection from it.  Anything might have happened if she hadn't. And even now I feel that only my marriage vows will close up the case for the judge, even yet he may. But when Ruth had got on with Alfred, she had wiped judge Wade's appreciation of him completely off my mind and destroyed it in tender words that burned as both worse than Jane's fire burnt to the letter. She did mean awfully good service. And so you see, you lovely woman, you do not that you were for him as a tribute to his greatness and as it's given to you to fulfill a destiny. She was so beautiful, as she said it, that I had to turn my eyes away. But I felt as I did when the solemn, let not man put a sonder word so spoken over me by Mr. Raines, our minister. It made me frightened, and before I knew it, I had poured out the whole truth to her in a perfect cataract of words. The truth always acts on women as some hizito and dry drug, and you can never tell what reaction is going to be. In this case, I was stricken dump and found it hard to see. Oh, dear heart! She exclaimed as she reached out and drew me into her lovely gracious arms. Then the privilege is all the more wonderful for you as you make some sacrifice to complete his life. Having suffered this, you will be all the greater woman to understand him. I accept my own sorry at his hands willingly, as it gives me the largest sympathy for his work, though he will no longer need my personal encouragement as he has for years. In the light of his love, this lesser feeling for Dr. Moore will soon pass away and the accord between you will be complete. And this was more than I could stand.  Now, who would have thought that girl could dance as she did? By this time, I was in such a solution of grief that I would soon have had to be soft up with a sponge if Pat hadn't run in all bubbling over. Happiness has a habit of not even acknowledging the presence of grief, and Pat didn't seem to see our red noses, crushed draperies and generally damp atmosphere. Molly, she said, was a deliciously young giggle.  He has spent a guinea ready to induce them to clean up the uniforms, and it cost him five pounds to build the cornetist out of gall for roost-dropping. He says, I'm to tell you that, as this is your festivity, you ought at least to pay the piper. Hurry up, he's waiting for me. And here's the kiss he told me to put on your left ear. I suppose you delivered that kiss straight from where he'd given to you, petty dear. I have the spray to say, as I went over to the desk for my purse. Why, Molly, you know me better than that. She exclaimed from behind a perfect rose cloud of blushes. I know Tom better than I do you. I answered, as she fled with the money in her hand. I looked at Ruth Clinton, and he both laughed. It is true that the broader sympathy is one of the by-products of sorrow, and a week ago I might have presented Pett to a marked agree instead of giving her the money and a blessing. I'm going quick, Molly, with that laugh between us. Ruth said, as she rose and took me into her arms again for just half a second, and before I could stop her, she was gone.  She bent down and kissed the back of his neck, which, theft, was almost more than I could stand, and apparently more than Billy was prepared to accept.  Don't you see I'm busy?  He was hot, perspiring and pounding, but full of triumph. I found it, Molly, I found it! He exclaimed as he let the heavy pound drop almost on the bare-pink toes. You can get a hammer and pound the end sharp, and bandits in no will we catch can get away from nothing. Your father can put it in your trunk, because it's too long for mine, and I can carry father's shirts and things in mine. Get a hammer quick, and I'll help you do it. The pain in my breast was almost more than I could bear. Lover, I said as I knelt down by him in the dim old hall, and put my arms around him, as if to shield him from some blow I couldn't help being aimed at him. You wouldn't mind much, would you? If just this time your Molly couldn't go with you?  Why, Molly, he said, flaring his astonished blue eyes at me. It isn't me to be too care of.  Sides, father isn't very useful, and maybe wouldn't help me hold the rope rye to keep the whale from getting away. He don't know how to do like I tell him, like you do. Try him, Lover, and maybe he will have learned to. I couldn't help the tears that came to stop my words. Now, you see, Molly, how you'd cry with that kissbot gone.  You can give most a hundred kisses every night if you don't say no more about not going and to make that whale hook for me quick, the coaxed against my cheek.   You are soul of my soul and heart of my heart and spirit of my spirit. I don't know how I managed to answer Mrs. Johnson's call from my front gate, but I sometimes think that women have a torture-proof clause in their constitutions. She and Aunt Betty had just come up the street from Aunt Betty's house, and the pallet cook was following them with a large basket in which were packed things Aunt Betty was contributing towards the entertainment of the distinguished citizen. Mrs. Johnson is outfits nearest Kinsman, Helsborough, and of course, he is to be their guest while he is in town. He'll be feeling his eyes on Molly, so he'll not even know he's eating my Kensington Almond pudding with Somerset's old port in it. He's down to Betty with a laugh as I run across the street with him. There's going to be a regular epidemic of love affairs in Helsborough, I do believe. She continued in her usual strain of sentimental speculation. I saw Mr. Grace talking to Deliah Hawes in front of the drapers an hour ago, as I came out from looking at the blue shins to match pad for the West Wing, and they were both so absorbed they didn't even see me. That was what might have been called a convocation dinner you gave the other night, Molly, in more ways than one. I wish a spark had set off phantom weight in Henrietta, too. Maybe you did, but it is just taking the fire slowly. I think it would be a good thing just to let Aunt Betty blindfold every unmarried person in this town and marry them to the first person they touch hands with. It would be fun for her, and then we could have peace, and apparently as much happiness as we are going to have anyway. Mrs. Johnson seemed to be in somewhat the same state of mind as I found myself. Oh, she said as we went up the front steps. I'll be glad when you are married and settled, Molly Carter, so the rest of this town can quiet down and to peace once more. And I sincerely hope every woman under 50 in Hillsborough who is already married will stay in that state until she reaches that age. But come on in, both of you, and help me get this marriage feast ready if I must. The day is going by on greased wheels, and I can't let Mr. Johnson Crutch has been neglected. Alfred or no, Alfred. And from then on, for hours and hours, I was strapped to a torture wheel that turned and turned minute after minute as it crowned spines and sugar and bridal meat sent me relentlessly into a great suffering pulp. Could I have in all my life have hungered for food and been able to get it past the lumber in my throat that grew larger with the seconds? And if Alfred's pudding tasted of the sort of dead sea fruit this evening, it was from my surctitious tears that ripped into it. It was late, very late, before Mrs. Johnson realized it, and shewed me home to get ready to go to the train along with the brass band and all the other welcomes. I hurried all I could, but for long minutes I stood in front of my mirror and questioned myself. Could this slow, pale, dead-eyed, slim, drooping girl, be the rollicking girl of a molly who had looked out of that mirror at me one short week ago? Where were the wings on her heels?  Slowly at last, I lifted the blue muslin, 23-inch waist shroud and let it slip over my head and fall slimly around me. I was fastening the buttons behind and was fumbling the next one into the buttonhole when I suddenly heard laughing, excited voices coming up the side street that ran just under my west window. Something told me that Alfred had come by the five-down train instead of the six-up, and I fairly reeled to the window and peeped through the Venetian blind. They were all in a laughing group around him, with Tom as master of ceremonies, and Ruth Clinton was looking up into his face with an expression, I am glad I can never forget. It killed all my regrets on the score of his future. It took two good looks to take him all in, and then I must have missed some of him. For all in all, he was so large that he stretched your eyes to behold him. He's grown seven feet tall. I don't know how many pounds he weighs, and I don't want anybody ever to tell me. I had never thought enough about evolution to know whether I believed in it and woman's suffrage. But I know now that millions of years ago a great big distinguished hippopotamus stepped out of the woods and frightened one of my foremothers so that she turned and fled through a sicket. There's almost tore her limb from limb right into the arms of her own maid. That's what I did. I caught that blue-setten belt and hooked it together with one hand and ran through my garden right over a bed of savage tiger lilies and flung myself into John Moore's surgery and slammed the door and backed up against it. He's come, I gasped, and I'm right into death but there's nobody but you to run to. Hide me quick!  I was of that deadly court you can get when fear runs into your very marrow and congeals to blotting your arteries. Quick! Quick! I panted. He must have been as pale as I was, and for an eternity of a second he looked at me. Then suddenly, John shunned from his eyes and he opened his arms to me with just one word. Here. I went.  I understood things then that I never had before and I felt I was safe at last. I raised my hand and breasted against John's wet lashes until he could let me speak and I was melted into his very breast itself. Molly, he said when enough tenderness had come back into his arms to let me breathe you have almost killed me. You! I exclaimed crowding still closer or at least trying to. It's not you. It's I that I'm killed and you did it. I know you don't really want me but I can't help that I'd rather you do the suffering with me than to do it myself away from you.  I put the case the strongest way I knew how. Won't you, Molly? He almost sobbed and I felt his heart pounding hard next to my shoulder. Yes, want me? I answered with more spirit and breath left in me.  I feel sure I left no stone unturned. Some of them I can already think back and I see myself tugging at and it makes me hot all over. I'm foolish, I'd always was so I'm to be excused for acting that all for way but you are to blame for letting me do it.   Blossom, he said after he had touched me with another broken dose of love as large as he thought I could stand I could have stood more I am never going to tell you how long I have loved you but that day you came to me all in a flutter with spanner's letter in your hand it is going to take you a lifetime to settle for you were mine and bills how could you? but women don't understand I felt him shudder in my arms as I held him close don't women know John? I managed to ask softly memory of a lie question he had put to me across that Breton jam with a rose a listening from the dark what brought me to consciousness was his fumbling with a lace on that blue muslin relict of a sentiment the lace had got caught on his sleeve buttons please don't forget that that is his possession I laughed under his gin I'm still scared to death of him and you haven't hit me yet Molly, he asked and this time was a heaven love where could you be more effectually hit from Alfred Bennett than in my arms I spent ten minutes telling Billy what a hippopotamus really looks like and I put him to bed but later, much as I should have liked to I couldn't consume that horrible dinner that I had helped prepare Reddy Johnson's in the shelter of John's arms and I had to face Alfred Ruth Clinton was there and she faced him too a man that can't be happy with a woman who is willing to fulfill his destiny doesn't deserve to be then we came over here and John had the most beautiful time persuading Aunt Adeline how a good man like Mr. Carter would want his young widow to be taken care of by being married to a safe friend of his instead of being flighty and having forks wondering whom she would marry you know yourself how hard a time a beautiful young widow has Mrs. Henderson he set him the tone of voice that always makes his patients glad to take his worst doses he got his blessing and me was a warning a lovely night wind is blowing across my garden and bringing me congratulations from all my flower family flowers are a part of love and the ruin of it and they understand I am waiting for the lights to go out behind the tall trees over which the moon is starsily sinking he promised me to put it out at once and I'm watching the glow that marks a place where my own two men creatures are going to rest with my heart in full song he needs rest he's so very tired and warm he confessed it as I stood on the step above him tonight after he had taken his own good night from me out under the oak tree when he explained to me how his agony over me for all these months had kept him walking the floor night after night not knowing that I was waiting for the light to go out I gave myself a sweetness that I am going to say prayer for the last thing before I sleep I took his head and my arms and put my lips to that drake-tailed kiss-bot that has tempted me for I won't say how long then I fled and so did he I had about decided to burn this book because I shan't need it any longer for he says he and Billy and I are going to play so much golf and tennis that I shall keep as thin as he wants me to without any more melting or freezing or starving but perhaps he would like to read the little red book End of Leaf Eight End of The Melting of Molly by Mariah Somsen Davis


Scrubs are for placing catheters not for selling eyewear. Fence, but I'm gonna say it. If you're an optician and you're wearing scrubs, you need to hear this. Your scrubs are ugly.  Now, I've heard it all. You know, I've heard them say, oh, it's easier to have everyone in the same uniform so you don't have to worry about inappropriate dress. Okay, well, what that tells me is that you didn't lay the appropriate expectation for the dress code and properly follow up when the dress code was not enforced. Don't be lazy, a great business takes continued work. That's my response to that. I've also heard it's better not to have to worry about what you'll be wearing that day, right? Really? This is your job. You should worry about what you're wearing and you should present yourself that way because guess what? The world worries about what you're wearing. I've heard some offices use the excuse of we wanna make sure patients can recognize who works here. Really?  My favorite though is when I hear offices say, well, nurses wear them. You're right, nurses do wear them.  But nurses wear them because they get blood and snot and all sorts of bodily fluid on them. That's what scrubs are for. You, however, are selling a high-end luxury product to these people that we are going to call patients. Yes, just like nurses do, but those nurses are saving their life, not selling them a $500 product. So what is the value of most eyewear? Frames and lenses that you're selling in your office is at $500 in your office, $800, over a thousand, right? What are other things in society that we buy at these rates? Can we throw up those visuals for marketing from a CE event? Yeah, let's do that, okay? That'll be good here. So purses, fancy shoes, even cell phones. Now, in all the places where we buy these things, is anybody wearing scrubs? No, they're not, because this looks dumb. It looks very dumb. Now, what if you say, oh, our glasses aren't that expensive? Okay, well, even if you go into a place where you sell things that are 30 bucks a pop. Okay, let's, can we throw something up? Yeah, there you go. Okay, look what they're wearing.  I see so many obstacles where opticians are wearing scrubs and it drives me insane. This is all coming about because my aunt asked me the other day, where the best place in town to get glasses was, right? Knowing that she has been going to a local doctor for a long time, that has totally acceptable glasses, great selection, and that has a group of opticians there that are lovely, right? I asked, what was she looking for? And she said, she felt like the office was great for the exam, but one had some super cute frames and that office seemed not as fashionable. Exact words. What did the opticians wear there, I wonder? Mm-hmm, scrubs. Some offices think that scrubs make you look medical and you're right, you do look medical, but the misconception is that they make you look more professional and that's where you're wrong. The profession needs to match what you're doing. Okay, professional football players wear a uniform. Professional real estate agents wear a suit. Professional salespeople maintain a refined look and professional nurses wear scrubs. Scrubs are for placing catheters not for selling eyewear. I understand that glasses are a medical device that holds your prescription, but they are as much of a medical device as a piece of a stick with rubber on the bottom that we call a cane. You don't believe me, look it up. Glasses are way more exciting than a cane. Glasses are fun, they're sexy, they're fashionable and our industry has been lacking on capitalizing on this concept. Until recently, one portion of our industry has made the fashionable part of optics the forefront of their business structure. They have gone out of their way to just focus on what society sees as the fun part of our industry. I'm talking about all the online distributors. They are focused on fun, funky styling and provide an easy way to get it. And they're doing it and they're making bazillions and they're doing it scrub-free. So the whole, I guess, intent of the soap box is for me to get the point across whether you're an optician who wants to be wearing scrubs or an optician who's being made to wear scrubs because your doctor deemed it that that is the way that things are done in your office, all I'm asking for is that you take the time to reflect on how you are being perceived by society. How are you being perceived by your patients? Our optical landscape is changing so much that if you do not at least take a look at changing up the way it's always been done in your office, your patient will find funkier and flashier and more Instagram selfie-worthier options out there. The least that you have to do is you have to reflect on how your patients are perceiving you in the office.