Alan Moore (left) chose comedian Stewart Lee as the recipient of his Longplayer letter. In January 02017, Iain Sinclair, a writer and filmmaker whose recent work focuses on the psychogeography of London, wrote a letter to writer Alan Moore as part of the Artangel Longplayer Letters series. The series is a relay-style correspondence, with the recipient of the letter responding with a letter to a different…  Read More

Iain Sinclair (left) chose Alan Moore as the recipient of his Longplayer letter. In November 02015, Manuel Arriga  wrote a letter to Giles Fraser as part of the Artangel Longplayer Letters series. The series is a relay-style correspondence: The first letter was written by Brian Eno to Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb then wrote to Stewart Brand, and Stewart wrote…  Read More

“WHAT BOOKS would you want to restart civilization from scratch?” The Long Now Foundation has been involved in and inspired by projects centered on that question since launching in 01996. (See, for example, The Rosetta Project, Westinghouse Time Capsules, The Human Document Project, The Survivor Library, The Toaster Project, The Crypt of Civilization, and the…  Read More

As visitors to Fort Mason amble past The Interval, the Long Now Foundation’s cafe-bar-museum-venue space, some are drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to an unusual eight foot-tall stainless steel technological curiosity they glimpse through the glass doors. Metal gears sit stacked one on top of the other to form a tower, with geneva wheels jutting…  Read More

With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years , the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from those who might wish to weaponize it, where to store it, by what methods, for how long,…  Read More

“The age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time,” writes Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. “This made people more productive, but did it make them any happier?” In a wide-ranging essay touching upon the advent of the wristwatch, railroads, and Daylight…  Read More

One of the most popular pieces of writing on our site is Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis’ remembrance of building an experimental computer with theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. It’s easy to see why: Hillis’ reminisces about Feynman’s final years as they worked together on the Connection Machine are at once illuminating and poignant, and paint…  Read More

ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SCENES in the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France depicts a confrontation between a man and a bison. The bison appears fixed in place, stabbed by a spear. The man has a bird’s head and is lying prone on the ground. Scholars have long puzzled over the pictograph’s meaning, as…  Read More

The Sudo family has been making sake for almost 900 years in Japan’s oldest brewery. Genuemon Sudo, who is the 55th generation of his family to carry on the tradition, said that at the root of Sudo’s longevity is a commitment to protecting the natural environment: Sake is made from rice. Good rice comes from…  Read More

It’s been an annual tradition since 01998: with a new year comes a new Edge question. Every January, John Brockman presents the members of his online salon with a question that elicits discussion about some of the biggest intellectual and scientific issues of our time. Previous iterations have included prompts such as “What should we…  Read More