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The Bargaining Chips Are … Chips: On Chris Miller’s “Chip War”
Historian of technology Patrick McCray describes Chris Miller’s “Chip War” as “an account of how chips became a strategically vital resource whose...
W. Patrick McCray
W. Patrick McCray is a professor of history at UC Santa Barbara and the author of five books on the history of modern science and technology including Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). McCray is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Articles
On Floating Upstream
In a review of Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand, W. Patrick McCray notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great...
No Geniuses Here
W. Patrick McCray praises Eric Hintz’s new book on America’s independent inventors in the 20th century.
Silicon Valley’s Hidden Voices
W. Patrick McCray lauds two new books for showing how Silicon Valley’s success and image are based on obscuring certain people.
Foggy Notions
W. Patrick McCray on “Rational Fog” by historian M. Susan Lindee. It addresses how “scientific knowledge and military applications meet, maraud...
Selling a Charismatic Technology
Historian of technology Patrick McCray reviews Morgan Ames’s new book on the MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop per Child program.
Silicon Valley: A Region High on Historical Amnesia
In his review of O’Mara’s “The Code,” Patrick McCray describes how the federal government provided the tailwind that pushed Silicon Valley to stardom.
Science’s Freedom Fighters
Any process of designing science, with its complex suite of methods, funding structures, laboratories, and so forth, is inherently political.
Silicon Valley’s Bonfire of the Vainglorious
W. Patrick McCray looks at two new books about Silicon Valley, Mark O'Connell's "To Be a Machine" and Alexandra Wolfe's "Valley of the Gods."
Life as a Verb: Applying Buckminster Fuller to the 21st Century
Jonathon Keats’s new book “You Belong to the Universe” is rooted in two orthogonal pictures of Buckminster Fuller.
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