The World's Fair

The World's Fair's popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months, and all the more so in the post-Puzzle Fantastica Era. (Data: We have readers almost every single day now. Sometimes even more. Recent problems at the Sb server may have been our fault. Point made.) We've been brought by these circumstances to issues of governance, and we are now taking recommendations for members of our forthcoming Advisory Board.

First up: Karl Iagnemma.

Some might argue that Dave and I wish we were Karl Iagnemma. I might argue that. Dave might not. Dave is Dave. But I'm of diffracted identity, so why not be Iagnemma?

If you're reading The World's Fair, and you are, I can see you, then you know we admire and are inspired by those who have PhD's from MIT engineering and can write for The Paris Review and All-Story ("Zilkowski's Theorem ").

Iagnemma -- isn't it great to say it over and over? -- is an MIT Roboticist and Novelist. He's much better than Alan Lightnman, if you're wondering. No slight against Alan Lightman, just that it's far more fulfilling to keep saying Iagnemma than Lightman. NOVA Science Now had a brief spot about him, which I flitted past the other night (not sure if it was new or a re-broadcast, but either way...).

His collection of short stories, On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, parts of which were anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2002, is what those in the business refer to as badass. That's a technical term, sure, but what people mean when they use it to refer to Iagnemma is that he is a badass. (You can tell the interns were drunk when they wrote this post. How embarrassing. To be so fawning. We hear Brad Pitt has something to do with Hollywood's plans to make a film about Iagnemma's short story collection. To be honest, that's probably how the interns came upon Iagnemma. Via Pitt.)

To be clear about what we're dealing with, there are no other human beings who have published in all of these places:

• IEEE Transactions on Robotics


• The Paris Review


• Journal of Terramechanics


• Zoetrope


• Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space, i-SAIRAS


• Best American Short Stories 2002


• ASME Journal of Medical Devices


• The 2003 Pushcart Prize Collection

He is the only one.

And to further his dossier as an Advisory Board candidate, we'll keep this brief list of links for him:

• Resources page, provided by NOVA over at their site.


• Another book Iagnemma recommends, as given to us by Moorishgirl.


• An interview that's fun to read, from American Scientist online.


• Another interview that's fun to read, from the literary e-zine Rose and Thorn.


• And a third interview, maybe the best of the three, by Robert Birnbaum, who has an entire series of excellent interviews at The Morning News.