Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.

As a child growing up in Toronto of the 1970s and 80s, Clive Thompson became fascinated with the first “home computers”—the ones you plugged into your TV, like the Commodore 64, and programmed using BASIC. He was hooked, spending hours writing video games, music programs, and simple forms of artificial intelligence. The obsession stuck with him, even as he went to the University of Toronto to study poetry and political science. When he became a magazine writer in the 1990s, the Internet erupted into the mainstream, and he began reporting on how digital tools—everything from email to digital photography to instant messaging—was changing society.

Today, Thompson is one of the most prominent technology writers—respected for keeping his distance from Silicon Valley hype and doing deeply-reported, long-form magazine stories that get beyond headlines and harness the insights of science, literature, history and philosophy. In addition to the New York Times Magazine and Wired, he's a columnist for Smithsonian Magazine, writing about the history of technology, and writes features for Mother Jones. His journalism has won many awards -- including an Overseas Press Council Award and a Mirror Award -- and he's a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow.

In his spare time he’s also a recording and performing artist with the country/bluegrass band The Delorean Sisters.