In the entranceway to our house, my significant other, a long-time wearer of the smart hat, keeps her hat stand. It’s a mock Victorian bust: on the surface of the ceramic head lies a phrenology map, created by one L. N. Fowler, Ludgate Circus, London, and “entered at Stationers Hall” sometime around 1850. Natives of upstate New…
Brendan Howley
Brendan Howley spent a decade covering covert operations and white-collar crime for The Fifth Estate. He co-invented HUME, a context software engine.
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Brendan Howley
My dad was a mathematical logician, one of the key minds in IBM’s heyday, an expert on modal logic and its data processing applications. What many of his colleagues didn’t know is that the barrel-chested wisecracking guy with the Liverpudlian accent in the office next door was an entirely self-taught man.
Fortunately for him, he had a…
Dateline: Serbia and Montenegro, September 1993. I’d landed in the first of the “CNN wars” — prequel to Operation Iraqi Freedom’s video game cinematography, to atrocities as media bait, to mass murder via technology “because we can” — set against medieval enmities and Balkan hyperinflation at an impossible level. In the parlance of the day, but before the Facebook-era neologism “weaponized,” the…