Bestselling author, journalist, and broadcaster Simon Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career and lectures widely at universities, geological and historical societies, and libraries. His new book Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic looks at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds.

The author of 30 books, Winchester specializes in eccentric, obsessive geniuses. In The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, Winchester traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The New York Times bestseller The Man Who Loved China, is the remarkable story of Joseph Needham, the eccentric and adventurous scientist who fell in love with China and whose own work there unveils the epic story of that magisterial country.

Simon Winchester's many books include Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Pacific, The Men Who United the States, and Atlantic, as well as the New York Times bestsellers The Professor and the Madman, an account of the men behind the Oxford English Dictionary, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, and The Map that Changed the World, about the nineteenth century geologist William Smith. Winchester has also penned books for young adults, The Alice Behind Wonderland and When the Earth Shakes. He is praised for his skills as a masterful and riveting storyteller both on the page and in lectures.

Historians