Keen On

I’ve always been a big admirer of Steven Johnson, whose prolific work focuses on the disruptive role of new technologies in shaping our past and future. In his new book, The Infernal Machine, Johnson writes about the turn of the 20th century, a period of feverish technology innovation and no less febrile political unrest. Our conversation focuses on the strange symbiosis between Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, Emma Goldman’s anarchist violence and the invention of J. Edgar Hoover’s modern surveillance state. Good stuff from one of the world’s most eclectic thinkers. Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now, The Ghost Map, and Extra Life. He’s the host and cocreator of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series How We Got to Now, the host of the podcast The TED Interview, and the author of the newsletter Adjacent Possible. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.Named as one of the "100 most