When Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2002, I was twenty-two and deep in one of those unfortunate periods during which a young writer wants to be serious but doesn’t quite know what that means.
For centuries, Burg Ockenfels was home to medieval knights angling to control traffic along the Rhine River. Today the stone castle flaunts two round towers, a row of Renaissance-style statues and a courtyard that looks out over hills and farms.
For about five minutes a few months ago, people seemed to genuinely believe that our culture was entering the age of “deinfluencing.” “Step aside, influencers,” wrote CNN.
I still love software as much today as I did when Paul Allen and I started Microsoft. But—even though it has improved a lot in the decades since then—in many ways, software is still pretty dumb.
omething strange happened the first time I encountered an article online that I wrote for a print magazine. The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish.
