TITLE : FASTER: THE ACCELERATION OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING.

PREFACE

Synchronize your watches. We have reached the epoch ofthe nanosecond. This is the heyday ofspeed.

If one quality defines our modern, technocratic age, it is acceleration. We are making haste. Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers-they all run faster now than ever before. And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies, the more rushed we feel.

In Faster, James Glelick explores nothing less than the human condition at the turn of the millennium. He shines a light of enterprising and analytical reporting-as well as sly wit-on the newest paradoxes of time, His journey takes us through the bunkers and trenches of a war we barely knew WC were fighting: to the atomic clocks of the Directorate of Time, to the waiting rooms that focus our impatience, to the film production studios that test the high-speed limits of our perception, to the air-traffic command centers that give time pressure new meaning.

We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don't completely understaf id it, and we're not altogether happy about it. Faster is a mirror field up to our times-and a mordant reminder of why some things take time.