The Soviet internet began with a search for telepathyHow Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet

A new book traces the Russian internet's origins to Soviet research into telepathy and the contacts between American and Soviet parapsychologists, which later helped open a path to the global network.

In 1982, a live US-Soviet satellite TV link was cut off halfway through when the promoter Bill Graham decided the whole thing was a KGB trick and literally pulled the plug. Many of the people organising such exchanges also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain another way: through telepathy.

One detail in the book stopped me: one of Russia's first internet providers was founded in the 1980s with the help of Americans who had earlier sought out Soviet parapsychologists. In the USSR, telepathy was once studied as a legitimate science.

Put telepathy and the internet on the same line, and somehow it reads as a natural sequence.