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Early in my career, I was a general assignment reporter in El Paso, covering news on both sides of the border. It was a great place for stories, because most of them were international, and rife with all kinds of blind spots and misunderstandings. Ever since, it's been the home base for my novels, first The Boost and more recently, Donkey Show.
I wrote The Boost after researching and writing my non-fiction book, Final Jeopardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), about the Jeopardy computer, Watson. It seemed apparent to me that machines like Watson would change the way we manage knowledge, language and memory--in short, how we think. Computers would also be getting smaller and coming in closer contact with us, and perhaps eventually be implanted in our brains. So I took a break from non-fiction and wrote a novel about that future.
A bit about my history. I graduated from college with a love of Spanish and a desire to be a writer. So I moved to Quito, Ecuador, taught English and wrote fiction. I couldn't sell my stories. So I turned to journalism, starting out at The Black River Tribune, in Ludlow, Vermont. My goal, though, was to be a foreign correspondent. So I freelanced in Spain and Argentina, got a job as a reporter at The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela, and later, The El Paso Herald-Post. Finally I got a job as BusinessWeek's bureau chief in Mexico City, where I stayed for 5 and a half years and where my wife and I started our family (3 boys). We moved on to Pittsburgh, where I ended up spending a lot of time at Carnegie Mellon University and delving into technology. BW sent me to Paris in 1998 to cover European technology. We moved back to New York in 2002. Four years later, I wrote a cover story on the coming Big Data economy , Math Will Rock Your World. It led to The Numerati.
I've written a number of other books. No need to summarize them here. They're on this author page.
Since moving back from Paris, my wife and I have been living in Montclair, NJ. Our sons are in Pittsburgh, Austin, and Mexico.
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