Barbara Koenen, director of Chicago Artists Resource in the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, just started reading: James Gleick’s The Information (Click on the caption for more)
“His book, Chaos, from the 1980s, was so revelatory and inspiring to me as an artist and, later, as a bureaucrat. He talked about how systems develop and patterns evolve, and our attempt to identify and predict them—and he was great at explaining complex physics so a layperson could understand. Very engaging. In talking about this new book, Gleick said it has taken him 20 years to understand what he’d started writing about in Chaos—that ‘information’ is a fundamental building block of the world found in genes, bytes, currents, codes, bits, libraries, etc. He also talks about the invaluable role of redundancy in communication, which I find especially reassuring. I haven’t finished it yet, because I’m savoring every bit!”