Harper's Magazine August 2015

Maybe We Can’t The query in the title of David Bromwich’s meditation on Barack Obama’s presidency [“What Went Wrong?,” Essay, June] cannot be satisfactorily explored without reckoning with the many liberal Democrats who believed that Obama would be a transformative or uniquely beneficent political figure in the first place. Obama’s distaste for controversy, his conventionality, and the banal divergence of his actions and words were apparent from the beginning of his center-left campaign. Certain observers at that time were not enchanted by the candidate whom Advertising Age, without apparent irony, dubbed Marketer of the Year in 2008. Ralph Nader noted that Obama had “raised far more money than John McCain from Wall Street interests, corporate interests, and, above all, corporate lawyers,” and then wisely admonished Obama’s voters to “prepare to…

Ten years ago this month, on the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was at Camp Casey, an informal encampment outside George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, listening to a group of veterans talk about their opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By chance, it was also the day my first feature for Harper’s Magazine went to press, an essay about how people react in the wake of major urban disasters. It wasn’t until the following Easter that I went to New Orleans for the first of at least two dozen post-storm visits. The water had receded by then, and the houses had been searched by teams who left what became a familiar mark throughout the city: a big spray-painted x with data written in each of…

Factor by which the average salary in the securities industry exceeded that of other U.S. workers between 1929 and 2008 : 2.3 By which it does today : 3.6 Portion of financial-services workers who say that they must “engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful” : 1/5 Percentage of black professional U.S. women who aspire to “a powerful position with a prestigious title” : 22 Percentage of white professional women who do : 8 Percentage change since 2002 in the birthrate among unmarried U.S. women aged 35 to 39 : +52 Among unmarried U.S. teenagers : –32 Percentage change in the past four decades in the size of the average American family : –10 In the square footage of the average newly built American home : +60 Percentage…

Bill Duvall grew up on the peninsula south of San Francisco. The son of a physicist who was involved in classified research at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a military-oriented think tank, Duvall attended UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s; he took all the university’s computer-programming courses and dropped out after two years. When he joined the think tank where his father worked, a few miles from the Stanford campus, he was assigned to the team of artificial-intelligence researchers who were building Shakey. Although Life magazine would later dub Shakey the first “electronic person,” it was basically a six-foot stack of gear, sensors, and motorized wheels that was tethered—and later wire-lessly connected—to a nearby mainframe. Shakey wasn’t the world’s first mobile robot, but it was the first that was intended to be…

Welcome, friends! We’re building a community of excellence in one of the most impressive estates in Silicon Valley. We believe that the right people in a place like this can make for a great environment and geometric scaling of success for everybody. You must: —have a top-class degree or job with a strong math/science requirement —exercise at least fifteen hours in a normal week —commute by car less than 20 percent of the time —prefer organized systems and common rules This may not be the right place if you: —watch more than four hours of TV/movie/ game entertainment per week —have more than one tattoo —have attended more than one protest —make more than three posts a week to social media —wear makeup more than twice a week —own any clothing,…

I am a postdoc in a field that requires occasional soldering and minor circuitry. For my Ph.D. I created all my electronic equipment, and have over seven years experience doing so. Despite this, each time there is a project that requires soldering, my adviser says to wait until [male colleague] is in, since “he knows what he is doing.” Lately I have stopped asking, but when I tell my adviser I’ve finished the project, he always has to come “check it,” then acts surprised when it works. When I was a new assistant professor, I went to a meeting for researchers in my field. I gave my talk, which was well received, with many questions leading to discussions then and afterward. Later, I encountered one of the well-known male professors,…