Reason interviews Wired editor Chris Anderson

By at 1:46 pm Friday, Sep 22

Nick Gillsepie, editor-in-chief of Reason says: "I thought you might be interested in our interview with Chris Anderson, which is now online."
Among the highlights:
  • Anderson says he was a "complete fuck-up" who graduated high school late and flunked out of the University of Maryland with "a 0.0 G.P.A."
  • Calls himself a "small 'l' libertarian" who nonetheless voted for Al Gore in 2000: "But I’m not proud of this. I wish the system would put forward politicians that I could vote for."
  • Says being a parent of four young children "has made me a better boss."
  • Dismisses the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes' criticism of The Long Tail: "I struggled a little bit with some of those statistics in my first week of researching this, too, but fortunately, I had time to actually do the math."
  • Takes on social theorists such as Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz who fear that too much choice is paralyzing: "The answer to the paradox of choice is help."
  • Talks about his musical past in a band called R.E.M., which lost a Battle of the Bands to the famous band of the same name.
  • Discusses his proudest achievement at Wired: "What I’m most proud of is that we made our very optimistic message about how technology can change the world [matter again] after many people had written that off after the dot-com bust. I’m very proud that we stuck to our mission and that that message resonates [again]. I don’t think we caused it to resonate, but when the world recognized what sort of felt obvious to those of us who live in this world, I was very proud that we were still leading that."
Link

Mark Frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

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