Thomas S. Mullaney, "How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information" (W. W. Norton, 2026)

Information is not a stable entity but a fragile configuration constantly battling entropy. Human history relies on the "putting into formation" of knowledge, yet this process is inherently incomplete and prone to decay. Modern states disproportionately shape archives by prioritizing records that serve their own anxieties and aspirations, leaving vast swaths of human experience unrecorded. Technologies like photography and artificial intelligence offer an illusion of total capture, but they often obscure the tacit, embodied knowledge essential to human existence. Thomas S. Mullaney, a historian of modern China, examines these themes through the lens of his own family history, revealing how parents perform iconographic roles that conceal their true, multidimensional selves from their children. Ultimately, the struggle to preserve memory is a high-wire act against an entropic universe, where even the most sophisticated systems eventually succumb to disintegration.