That’s the title of a hefty new collection of essays by the great Edward Tenner, surely our wittiest and most learned expositor on the history of technology. I’ve only had time to dip in but it doesn’t disappoint. I first discovered Ed years ago when I stumbled across a piece he’d written for the Harvard Magazine. That essay led eventually to his remarkable book Why Things Bite Back, which explores what he calls “revenge effects.” We use technology to convert acute problems into chronic ones (e.g. stamping out hunger in many places only to realize we must exercise constant vigilance against obesity), but sometimes things do backfire. Consider antibiotics: intended to protect us from harmful bacteria, overuse conspires with natural selection to breed ever more dangerous microbes. A great line: “If there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.” The new collection, subtitled Essays in Unintended Consequences, is in the same rich vein. Readers who like this sort of thing will enjoy our forthcoming Tivoli Books title Catapult, by Jim Paul.
