The Fragile Undersea Cables that Connect Our World
Join Columbia Global Reports on Wednesday, May 6 at 12pm ET for an exhilarating conversation about the backbone of our modern life, a robust network of delicate undersea fiber cables, featuring experts across business, engineering, and journalism.
Samanth Subramanian, author of book The Web Beneath the Waves, along with Columbia Engineering Professor Ethan Katz-Bassett and Columbia Business Professor Eli Noam, will weigh in on this relatively unknown phenomenon that is critical to our day-to-day. This virtual panel will be moderated by CGR director Nicholas Lemann.
Register here by Friday, May 1.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
About the panelists:
Samanth Subramanian is the author of The Web Beneath the Waves. He writes for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian, among other publications.
Ethan Katz-Bassett is an associate professor in the Electrical Engineering Department and an affiliate in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, where he is also a member of the Computer Engineering Program and the Sense, Collect and Move Data Center at the Data Science Institute.
Eli Noam is Professor of Economics and Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility, emeritus at Columbia Business School. He’s currently Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a research center focusing on management and policy issues in telecommunications, internet, and electronic mass media.
Nicholas Lemann is director of Columbia Global Reports and Dean Emeritus of Columbia Journalism School. He’s also a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of several highly acclaimed books, most recently Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.
In The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World acclaimed journalist Samanth Subramanian charts the geopolitical tensions, corporate power grabs, environmental risks, and quiet heroics involved in maintaining the Internet’s unseen circulatory system.
“A brief, lyrical survey of the internet’s underwater infrastructure and the people who maintain it.” —The Economist
Columbia Global Reports is a nonprofit publishing imprint from Columbia University that commissions authors to produce works of original thinking and on-site reporting from all over the world, on a wide range of topics.
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