(2013); and The Mayor's Tongue (2008). His short fiction has won the Emily Clark Balch Prize and been a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has also written two works of nonfiction: Second Nature (2021), which includes the story that serves as the basis for the film Dark Waters; and Losing Earth (2019), a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Losing Earth is being adapted into a film directed by Tom McCarthy.
Rich is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans.
Rich applied the Page 69 Test to Cloudthief and shared the following:
Page 69 of Cloudthief introduces the Cloud—one of the most pernicious metaphors of contemporary life.Visit Nathaniel Rich's website.
The scene takes place on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River, overlooking the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. Tim is a disillusioned climate journalist who realizes his professional training can be repurposed for a more lucrative line of work: theft. Virginia is a hermetic con artist who until recently has resided in a mini-storage unit in midtown Manhattan. Together they have hatched a scheme to steal the world’s most valuable commodity: information. They plan to stage a heist of the world’s largest information treasury, a massive data center in eastern Oklahoma. It’s the winter of 2014:Few had heard of data centers then. Those who had tended to look away, as from the sun, even though its energy was the source of our existence. The main reason for this collective blind spot was linguistic in nature. For the term most commonly applied to the enormous trove of data that powered society was childish, deceitful, and inane. We called it “the Cloud.”The great lie of modern technology is that “information wants to be free”: that information is ethereal, vaporous, floating in the atmosphere. Information is not invisble, however. It lives on screenless computers called servers, stacked in giant warehouses called data centers. The companies that own data centers (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft) are in no rush to explain this fundamental fact to an incurious public. They would prefer we consider their technological wonders a modern form of magic: intangible, omnipresent, invincible.
Tim and Virginia realize that this sleight-of-hand can be exploited. Because few people understand the full value of the information stored in data centers, data centers tend not to concern themselves too greatly with security measures. Tim and Virginia realize that if they can steal just a few servers from a data center, they will gain access to secrets—secrets from which they can generate outlandish profits.
So in the case of Cloudthief, page 69 is representative of the rest of the novel, in that it articulates one of the story’s central themes, and sets in motion the rest of the plot. For it’s on page 69 that Tim and Virginia begin to grasp the full scale of what they’re up against, and how rich they can get—so long as they don’t blow it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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