City Lights and W. W. Norton & Company celebrate the publication of “How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information”
Thomas Mullaney in conversation with Abby Smith Rumsey
discussing the new book
How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information
By Thomas Mullaney
Published by W. W. Norton & Company
A brilliant foray into the nature of information, of history, and of making meaning in the face of death and decay.
When world-renowned scholar Thomas S. Mullaney “lost” both his parents, he began thinking of how information—all the stuff that makes us, that we make, and that we leave behind—ultimately disappears. The information that makes up our lives, from mundane official documents, poignant family photos, and sentimental artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes, both defines us, and inevitably decays, no matter the medium. Everything that we put “in formation” eventually collapses into randomness. Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent’s death. Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made.
How We Disappear is a wide-ranging examination of the micro and macro, toggling between storytelling from Mullaney’s own life and his reflection on the science of entropy and the nature and history of information. Lyrical and poignant, the book offers inspiring and eye-opening insight on the miracle of existence, and on what it means to forge meaning from a chaotic universe.
Thomas S. Mullaney is an award–winning Stanford historian, Guggenheim fellow, and former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author of four books on Chinese history and technology and lives in Palo Alto, California.
Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She focuses on the impact of information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity, the nature of evidence, and the changing roles of libraries and archives. She is Chair of the Board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences at Stanford University. Her books include Memory, Edited. Taking Liberties with History (MIT Press 2023) and When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (Bloomsbury Press 2016).
Advance praise for “How We Disappear”
“Both scientifically authoritative and deeply, movingly poetic, How We Disappear is a reckoning with impermanence that doubles as a lesson in how entropy actually functions. I don’t mind knowing that I’m both living and dying at once if it means I can spend a bit of my time on earth in the company of a mind like Thomas S. Mullaney’s.”
Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao
“From the personal to the cosmic, loss and disappearance give up their terrors as Thomas S. Mullaney ranges with encyclopedic erudition from fossils to tax returns, photographs, sonograms, language, digitization, and far more in an idiosyncratic history of technology that is also a history of History, its dreams and its errors.”
Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
“A stunning meditation on history, memory, and loss. Toggling between the history of information and the history of his father’s life, moving fluidly across the ‘archives of humankind,’ Thomas S. Mullaney speaks to us—in one breath—as historian, philosopher, and descendant, searching for meaning in the face of loss and the ‘will to keep on living.’”
Kendra Taira Field, author of The Stories We Tell (forthcoming) and chief historian of the 10 Million Names Project
“A beautiful and profoundly moving meditation on memory, loss, and about what survives us—and what doesn’t. This is intellectual history at its most intimate: learned, lucid, and deeply personal.”
Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed
“Unlike anything I’ve ever read, this book works through painful memories of personal loss as a metaphor for the inevitable tradeoff between communication and the loss of information. But what makes this book really special is Mullaney’s prose, taking the reader on an exhilarating journey of mental time travel across vast distances in time and space.”
Charan Ranganath, author of Why We Remember
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation