Books I Read This Month: April 2025

Susannah Cahalan • Saul Bellow • Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska

The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (Susannah Cahalan)

Timothy Leary was a prophet, for better or worse. Drugs were central to the story, inevitably. When he brought the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra—workshopped with fellow oracle Marshall McLuhan—to the masses in 1967 at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park and on American college campuses, he let his young listeners know that LSD was a necessary but probably temporary solution. In the short term, acid was the easiest means of bombing bourgeois brains. “Beloved robots,” he said, practically begging them to dose themselves, “you’ve got to drop out.” Nine years later, he claimed to have new antidotes, telling reporters that technology might be the means to break from conformity. He promoted personal computers, radical life extension, augmented intelligence, and a decentralized space program.¹ Five decades later, we have microdosing Silicon Valley computer billionaires selling immortality, neural implants, and private rocket companies. It’s been a long trip, from there to here.

After Harvard jettisoned the ethically dubious Leary in 1963, and before McLuhan urged him to market LSD as if it were Pepsi, the erstwhile academic was supporting himself as a freelance psychonaut when he met Rosemary Woodruff. A high school dropout from Missouri, the striking brown-eyed woman was an actress, airline stewardess, and autodidact who dog-eared every book in her local public library after moving to Manhattan. On the rebound from three consecutive abusive relationships, she met Leary, and they spent the next eleven years in cahoots—in a lysergic, tantric relationship—and made global headlines together while trying to turn psychedelia into a religion and LSD a sacrament.

In her biography, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, Susannah Cahalan attempts to rescue the woman who was Timothy Leary’s ride-or-die from his heavy shadow and recast her as a major player in the LSD culture that shook the nation during the '60s and '70s and continues to cause aftershocks to this day. She’s mostly successful. The author introduces the central metaphor on page one: Woodruff’s dad was an amateur magician in St. Louis whose prestidigitation wasn’t profound enough to make his day job working on the levees disappear. As a girl, Rosemary would climb on bar tops in pubs after his performance and tap-dance to hoots and hollers as the act’s capper. This dynamic set her up for an adulthood in which she sought out partners who were tricksters, men who could call forth something beautiful that wasn’t quite real. And few people could con and conjure like Leary.

Before she met the defrocked academic, Rosemary—who knew from the start that she was a seeker of some sort—had dropped out of high school at 17 and escaped her stultifying home life for Las Vegas by marrying an Air Force pilot who battered his young bride whenever she “swore, answered back, or got angry.” She wisely fled before their first anniversary. A move to New York City ensued, along with a pair of toxic relationships—a marriage to a Dutch hipster accordionist with a temper and an affair with a composer obsessed with the ABCs: alcohol, bennies, and Crazy Horse, the Lakota warrior.²

A mutual friend asked Leary to take Rosemary in after a nasty ending with the symphonist. She tried to cover a black eye with makeup when the budding guru chauffeured her to the Hitchcock Estate in Hudson Valley, which he had turned into an unofficial psychedelics lab starting in 1963. She and Leary, besotted with each other and with chemicals, soon began a romantic relationship, with Rosemary assuming the role of the stylish leading lady of LSD. During these heady times at the Millbrook compound, the couple hosted a parade of fellow travelers—some friends, others parasites.

But she still wasn’t an equal in her domestic life. Leary would often talk about using hallucinogens to effect ego death, but no amount of tabs could slenderize the elephant under his hat. Like many cult leaders, he had moments of great insight and profundity, but he was just as often a phony, oil slick of a man, concerned only with his own endless needs and self-preservation. He would frequently leave Rosemary behind when on the road, soaking in the adulation of his admirers or hobnobbing with celebrities. That made life particularly unpleasant for her because factions at the house that were unhappy with Leary would bite their tongues with him but lash out at her. The inmates all but took over the asylum when Leary would abandon her. During 1967’s Summer of Love, while he was storming the nation, she was living alone in the woods in a small pump house on the Millbrook estate, avoiding the haters and riding out an acid overdose that had fried her nerves. During the trying weeks, she composed a poem: “Love/It’s a mad magician.”

Rosemary knew on some level that she’d fallen for a quick-change artist, a flimflam man, but she was under his thrall and would rationalize. “The thing to remember about Tim is that he didn’t want all the notoriety…” was one perplexing public pronouncement she made about one of the all-time media whores. Fleeting moments of clarity would emerge, like when she described Leary as a “song-and-dance man,” which is the most apt description for the once-serious scholar who became a vain vaudevillian. She also bristled when he encouraged reckless drug use and encouraged young people not to vote.

There were blissful moments when she shared the spotlight with Leary, like when they collaborated on a series of sold-out “psychedelic theater shows” staged at the 2,800-seat off-Broadway Village Theater in 1966, one year before they wed. Leary acted as emcee, leading performances based on Herman Hesse’s literature and the Buddha’s teachings. Diana Trilling called the performances ‘incomprehensible’—meant pejoratively, of course—but for many in the audience, that was the attraction.

Leary credited Rosemary’s gravitas and guidance with preventing him from becoming a sideshow spiritualist—“she continually joked me out of the trap of YMCA Hinduism”—though that’s exactly what he often was. His blandishments couldn’t make up for his endless betrayals, however. The arrests for possession began to pile up, especially when President Nixon opportunistically put Leary in his crosshairs. During these trying times, he encouraged Rosemary and even his underage daughter, Susan, to take the fall for him. (He was a disastrously neglectful father, and Susan had a painful life and death.³) His wife spent time in jail to protect him, and she eventually became a felon facing a lifetime in prison at his behest, forced to live underground for nearly two decades as a fugitive.

Life on the lam began after Leary received two consecutive ten-year prison sentences in California in 1969 for possessing a minuscule amount of marijuana. A miscarriage of justice, it rallied the counterculture to his side, even those figures who’d previously considered him a mealy-mouthed lightweight. He maneuvered a transfer from Folsom to a minimum-security facility in San Luis Obispo and angrily implored Rosemary to mastermind his escape whenever she visited him.⁴ Despite knowing it meant the end of her liberty, she did just that, conspiring with the Weather Underground and activist lawyers to break him out of prison—and out of the country. It was the beginning of their craziest trip together.

The incognito pair briefly stayed in Paris but knew they needed to live in a country without an extradition treaty with America. The perfect answer seemed to have arrived when they were granted asylum in the Algerian headquarters of the Black Panthers. Fellow fugitive Eldridge Cleaver⁵, a mercurial host who was heavily armed and quite insane, lorded over the property. It was an unending nightmare as he and his minions threatened, abused, and sometimes imprisoned their guests, who were forced to abscond once more. Switzerland was the next stop, and the couple was sheltered by gun runners and other disreputable types who had their own financial and personal motivations. The least of it was that they expected Leary to perform for them like an educated goat in exchange for their largesse. He happily entertained them, loving the attention of the miscreants, which made Rosemary shudder. For the first time, she reappraised the love of her life, realizing that he was “a man whose pathetic need to be loved by strangers trumped all else.”

Switzerland in 1971 was when their paths finally diverged. “I have delayed over and over and over again a final separation,” Rosemary wrote of the period, “finding it difficult to believe that he’s not the man he’d persuaded so many people that he was.” He found a new partner, but was soon arrested in Kabul. He served three years in prison after cutting a deal with the FBI. Once released, he embraced techno-futurism while surrounded by a new generation of hangers-on. She met other partners, quietly moved back to America, and anonymously worked at backbreaking jobs under an alias for more than two decades. (She eventually surfaced in 1992 and avoided prison time.)

But their separation wasn’t final and they were never completely done with each other—until his death from metastatic prostate cancer in 1996.⁶ There would be attempts at reconciliations until the end. Just weeks before he died, she proposed they remarry, he accepted, and then they called off the wedding. Love is a drug, but you may grow weary by how slow Rosemary was to see through her king. She realized belatedly that she’d joined a cult that she never was able to quit. Cahalan writes that “she reinterpreted her time with Timothy as a kind of delusional state.”

Cahalan likely trusts Rosemary’s version of events too much, but she does impressive work laying out in lucid prose an ungovernable history and making sense of a time and relationship that was often beyond reason. She rightly credits Rosemary for preserving this essential era of hallucinogenic history; without several astute decisions she made under great strain while on the run, Leary’s copious papers⁷, and her own, would have been lost instead of finding a permanent home at the New York Public Library. Minus these records, many of the period’s particularities would have been forgotten. By the book’s conclusion, you can’t question how important Rosemary was to the movement, though you can question how important the movement was in general.

As much of a Rosemary booster as the author is, she wisely leaves room for such questions, not subscribing to the couple’s grandiose ideas—he called LSD “one of the most important discoveries of the century, up there with the creation of the atomic bomb.” What would the '60s counterculture have looked like sans acid? Better? Worse? Leary’s irresponsibility led to a long freeze in medical research into hallucinogenics, which has only begun again in earnest this century. Rosemary, in retrospect, questioned whether she had profited intellectually from her liberal use of hallucinogenics. Had her hundreds of trips ultimately transported her anywhere?

If Rosemary wasn’t sure of the positives, the negatives were quite clear. She suffered periods of dissociation, including one freak-out where she couldn’t be sure that she was human: “Was she alive? Did she exist? Convinced that she was a man-made robot, Rosemary searched her body for a manufacturer’s imprint.” Her health also declined prematurely because of her heavy mind-altering experimentation. Two surgeries trying to correct congenital infertility didn’t help—especially since the initial one was botched—but her rampant drug use contributed to her early death.

Of all his prognostications that proved true, perhaps Leary’s greatest foresight was his bold 1987 assertion in Omni that “the way we define human beings will change. You won’t be a serf, a slave, or a worker. What will you be? A performer. Everyone will be performing.” It pointed to an age of the masses living in public that we now know—reality TV stars, TikTokers, even murderers—riffing on Andy Warhol’s proclamation that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But why let the fun end after just a quarter of an hour? Shamelessness is a fuel that never runs dry.

The chief friction in the book is that Leary, a born bullshitter, was at home in just such an exhibitionistic age, but Rosemary, a more sincere person, was made claustrophobic by the circus’ center ring. Cahalan, who hugs Rosemary close but is not a hagiographer, suspects that her subject may be more complicated than that and explodes this notion near the book’s end. Reading Rosemary’s letters to her parents, the author realizes that the anecdote about her magus father that created the blueprint for her life turns out to be greatly exaggerated, an origin story she created for herself rather than one that was thrust upon her. It’s the kind of legerdemain that would have made Leary, that confidence man, smile. As Cahalan notes: “She was an escape artist whose primary creation was herself.”•

Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Saul Bellow)

America’s picture-perfect Apollo 11 mission in 1969, beamed to eyeballs across the home planet, was widely seen at the time as the greatest expression yet of the human species’ ingenuity, as Homo sapiens completed its transition from trudging through jungles to walking on the moon. Writers, historians, scientists, and intellectuals were trotted out before the TV cameras to extol this new pinnacle. Soon after the Lunar Module Eagle touched down on the cratered surface—but before Neil Armstrong had taken “one giant leap for mankind”—Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were interviewed live on CBS.

The topics bandied about by the famed sci-fi authors were grandiose—even utopian. The advent of space travel could ultimately end war on Earth. A baby would be born in space before the end of the twentieth century. The moon would soon be the site of retirement communities for fortunate Earthlings in their dotage. Humanity, it was assumed, would quickly colonize the universe. Heinlein believed the mission had marked the species’ graduation from childhood to adulthood, capturing the ecstatic mood as he declared the moon landing “the greatest event in all the history of the human race up to this time.” It was a dizzying day, and a declaration spoken by a man inebriated by the majesty of the moment.

Two American literary novelists responded to the event differently—negatively. One was Norman Mailer, the other Saul Bellow. The former’s ego, vast enough to fill the cosmos, couldn’t tolerate the idea of his species being surpassed in intelligence by machines of its own creation. “Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies,” he wrote in his 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon. “He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision…. In the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor.” Mailer was, if hyperbolic, correct in recognizing that the Information Age had begun in earnest—and that wetware was headed for a battle that would make the space race seem insignificant.

“Like many of the people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler had entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice.”

The moon also looms over Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, casting a pall over an already troubled world. Artur Sammler, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor and retired newspaper correspondent living in Manhattan, observes as the city crumbles economically and civically. He’s distressed by the urban decay he witnesses and what he sees as moral rot in the nation, which he believes has been provoked by a narcissistic youth culture and its embrace of free love. He’s sure that a “sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world.” Sammler is in mourning for America. For Earth.

He might seem like just another old man yelling at a cloud—except it’s several months before Apollo 11 is to launch, and he’s more focused on rockets than on anything cumulus. The Nazis, the hippies—those would be bad enough. But in the final weeks before the first moon landing, technocrats are ascendant. Information is suddenly everywhere, and the shift toward data promises only to accelerate. “At the moment of launching from this planet to another something was ended, finalities were demanded, summaries,” Sammler thinks. He believes the moon mission has reduced his planet to “a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery.”

A little more than twenty-five years earlier, Sammler and his wife had been lined up naked with a large group of fellow Jews in Poland in front of a ditch they had been ordered to dig by the Nazis. The soldiers opened fire on the prisoners, and they collapsed dead almost in unison into the makeshift mass grave—except for Sammler. He was wounded but alive and struggled from beneath the heap of dead bodies to escape suffocation. Naked, freezing, and hungry in the Zamosht Forest, he did what he had to do to survive, joining the resistance and pushing himself past what he believed to be his moral limits. When the Nazis finally go into retreat, it’s the Poles themselves who begin to murder their former Jewish neighbors. For some mysterious reason, a caretaker at a mausoleum—who didn’t seem a likely champion of justice—let Sammler hide behind the gates for several months until the war ended, saving his life.

The man who now curses rockets was pals with H.G. Wells, the writer who practically willed humans to the moon.

Sammler lost the use of one eye but otherwise regained his health, if not his religious faith, after the Holocaust. He worked as a Polish newspaper correspondent in London, where he had been educated before the war. Now he’s a 76-year-old retiree living in Manhattan, a borough overrun by crime and vice, thanks to financial assistance from his nephew, Elya, a former gynecologist who grew rich by secretly performing illegal abortions on mafiosos’ goomahs and daughters. A traditionalist, a conservative, and a humanist, Sammler abhors the young people who have turned from family values—and the feeling is mutual.

When he appears as a guest lecturer about England during the 1930s at Columbia University, he’s interrupted by a longhair who objects to Sammler speaking favorably of George Orwell. “Orwell was a fink,” the young man declared. The student turns to his classmates and asks, “Why are you listening to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry.” Not entirely untrue, but certainly impolite. The rudeness and lewdness he encounters make the old scribe fear that American society is failing. “Like many of the people who had seen the world collapse once,” Bellow writes, “Mr. Sammler had entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice.”

Mr. Sammler’s daughter, Shula—an unhinged divorcée hiding from her abusive Israeli-artist ex—hounds him to complete a book he’s allegedly writing about H.G. Wells, whom he became friends with in London before WWII. Yes, the man who now curses rockets was pals with the famous writer who practically willed humans to the moon. The erudite Sammler rides each weekday on a bus from the apartment he shares with Elya’s daughter, his “progressive” grandniece, Margotte, to the New York Public Library so that he can read historians of civilization. On these commutes, he frequently spies a stylishly dressed pickpocket stealing from passengers. Eventually, the pickpocket observes Sammler observing him, and it’s clear there’ll be some sort of showdown.

Sammler still clings to a complicated essence, and not everyone will recognize his empathy.

This plot development would be worthwhile except that the pickpocket is an incredibly ugly stereotype of a Black man, which focuses on his clothes, skin color, criminality, and willingness to flash his genitals. If Sammler was being exposed for being a racist, that would be fine, but Bellow is the guilty party. It’s not just that Sammler sees things a certain way but that the author has created the unfortunate scenario. Bellow faced accusations of racism⁸ at different points in his career, and this depiction and numerous other lines about minorities elsewhere hang heavily over the book.

Apart from Sammler, the novel’s most interesting and developed character is Wallace, Elya’s perplexing failson. An intelligent fuckup with an interest in technology, Wallace has been in trouble from the start. He was kicked out of MIT, became a bartender, and nearly beat a drunk to death. He’s forever working on new moneymaking schemes which don’t sound ridiculous on their face, but whenever he’s around it seems something chaotic or violent is about to occur. His conversation is always prying and uncomfortable, which makes for some very funny scenes. He talks like an engineer from NASA or Silicon Valley: “The real thing is telemetry. Cybernetics.” His current scheme has him flying an airplane dangerously low to the ground to take photographs of the topography, which sounds something like what eventually would become Google Maps. Elya has bailed him out of many scrapes and knows his son is a “high-IQ moron.”

In its final third, the novel balances screwball comedy and somber drama. To encourage her father to finish his Wells book, Shula impetuously steals an unpublished manuscript about space colonization by an Indian scientist visiting Columbia. When Sammler figures out what’s happened, he endures a procession of errors while trying to return the text to its owner before his daughter is arrested. Meanwhile, Elya’s health declines rapidly when the blood vessels in his brain begin to leak, a condition that appears likely to be fatal. Sammler looks at his nephew, for all his flaws, and sees a man who has lived up to the “terms of his contract,” one who should be honored.

It’s a heady conclusion, a moving elegy to the end of an era when almost all the eyes on Earth turned to the “white corroded pearl” in the sky. But Sammler clings to his complicated essence, and not everyone receives his empathy. He sits down with Margotte, who has only been kind to him, and lectures her—urging her to apologize to her fragile father for her sexual adventuring, for not being what previous generations expected of her. Naturally, she’s livid. In this contentious scene, and in the unfortunate depiction of the pickpocket, the novel unwittingly reminds us why all eras must end.•

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska)

When I recently read Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Czech author Patrik Ouředník’s dazzling, idiosyncratic summation of life from WWI to Y2K, I was reminded in stark terms of the dual nature of technological advancement. If you look at war as an exchange of information as well as ammunition, you can begin to grasp both the promise and the peril of 1914, when the world came together for the first time in a global battle for supremacy. Ouředník writes, “…poor people looked forward to riding in a train, and country folk looked forward to seeing big cities and phoning the district post office to dictate a telegram to their wives…” Just think of the miracles and wonders! The future had arrived, at last, for the masses. It was like the World’s Fair—only with large-scale death and disfigurement.⁹

The heavy costs became plain when the scrums gave way to trench warfare, as soldiers shared their bunkers with rats biting their toes and fingers, and lice living in their hair. These were not trivial matters, but compared to the “advances” in chemistry that enabled mustard gas—so-called because the agent stung the nose like particularly pungent Dijon—they were a trifle. The sulfurous substance, delivered in liquid form in the heads of artillery shells, caused blisters, blindness, and respiratory failure. Many who survived its appalling effects suffered long-term health consequences, including a heightened risk of cancer. Technology and science made it all possible. Ah, progress.

It often doesn’t take long for technologies used abroad in warfare to find a home in the domestic budget. That scenario is playing out in America today, as the nation threatens to descend into fascism just as our tech sector is making the Minority Report seem inevitable. Alexander C. Karp, for one, is a big fan of the development. The co-founder of Palantir, which creates software platforms for big data analytics, first gained notoriety when his company’s products helped pinpoint the Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden. He’s now using Palantir’s tools to grant Donald Trump “untold surveillance power”¹⁰ over Americans. The information war being waged on bin Laden is now being waged on you and me.

The problem is that Silicon Valley is full of educated elites, we’re told by Karp (Stanford) and Zamiska (Yale Law).

Karp, in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West—the bestselling 2025 book co-written with Palantir CEO Nicholas W. Zamiska—is the latest Silicon Valley sultan to believe he has the answers to what ails the United States and the world. What’s alarming is most of his solutions involve supercharging the capacity to surveil and murder the nation’s enemies—and keeping an eye on the “enemies” within. He expresses these ideas in a polymathic manner, employing anecdotes about Beethoven, Pollock, and Lucian Freud to support his arguments, clearly seeing himself as an artist of some sort, perhaps not realizing that Ed Harris’s Christof character in The Truman Show was not a hero.

He even quotes religious texts. “A passage from the Talmud recounts an exchange with a teacher named Rabha who lived in the fourth century in a small town in Babylon located in present-day Iraq not far south from Baghdad,” Karp writes. “He considers whether it is permissible to kill a burglar who breaks into one’s home. Rabha makes clear that ‘if one comes to kill you, hasten to kill him first.’” There are other Talmud quotes he could have chosen. But you won’t find this one: “Great is peace, as the whole Torah was given in order to promote peace in the world.”

This cri de coeur has one main complaint—that today’s best engineers in Mountain View and Menlo Park prefer to focus on the consumer economy, making a mint while creating apps, rather than helping the U.S. government develop implements of war and install a police state. “Silicon Valley has lost its way,” Karp and Zamiska announce early on, longing for a time when technologists did cool things like the Manhattan Project. I’m not joking—Karp explicitly says that he longs for the good old days of atomic bomb development. “The state has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the Internet,” he writes. There’s no mention of the many members of the Manhattan Project who later regretted their involvement.

The problem is that Silicon Valley is populated by educated elites, we’re told by Karp (Stanford) and Zamiska (Yale Law). There’s a glowing blurb on the cover from Harvard graduate Walter Isaacson, one of the more insufferable profiteers of this benighted age, who’s been a stenographer to Silicon Valley egos for nearly a decade and a half. It’s easier than being an actual journalist, his former career. All he had to do was publish Steve Jobs’s lies verbatim, act like Elon is a necessary “crazy dreamer,” and pretend that Karp isn’t an authoritarian. The legacy media has pinned medals all over his well-tailored jackets for playing the part with the jocular salesmanship of the president of a dodgy online university.

“Karp accuses Silicon Valley’s best minds of being obedient to progressive politics rather than walking lockstep as he barks orders.”

Let’s at least appreciate the chutzpah of a voyeuristic technofascist like Karp, who complains that left-wing American protesters he disagrees with politically have the audacity to cover their faces during demonstrations—often to protect their livelihoods and futures. Karp admonishes them for their masks and hoods. “Is a belief that has no cost really a belief?” he wonders. “The protective veil of anonymity may instead be robbing this generation of an opportunity to develop an instinct for real ownership over an idea, of the rewards of victory in the public square as well as the costs of defeat.”

Dude, put down the camera. You’re creeping everyone out.

There’s no mention, of course, of the January 6 coup participants who also covered their faces—but that’s not surprising in this gussied-up, anti-woke screed. Karp accuses Silicon Valley’s best minds of being obedient to progressive politics rather than marching in lockstep as he barks orders. “The instinct toward obedience can be lethal to an attempt to construct a disruptive organization, from a political movement to an artistic school to a technology startup.” What he wants is for them to abandon their so-called principles and learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. “A more intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector” should be the goal, he advises.

In his twisted logic, if you refuse to participate in his machinations, you’re no better than the Milgram experiment¹¹ subjects who thought they were shocking people to death. But if you do go along with him—build the tools of war and domestic surveillance—you’re a free thinker, a modern-day Ralph Waldo Emerson. Everyone else is just a sheeple.

Much of the rest of the book is dedicated to offering advice on corporate team-building, using as reference points the mechanics of bee swarms and an out-of-publication instructional book about improvisational comedy by the late Canadian-British playwright Keith Johnstone.¹² Can you imagine if someone working at Palantir improvised a line about Karp being tried in the Hague? The technologist also makes numerous puzzling assertions. He writes that “no serious person denies Auschwitz,” when Elon Musk, who was until recently head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), amplified “historians” on X who have dishonestly revised Auschwitz.

Huge rationalizations also abound: The book tells us that “the dystopian future that Orwell and others have imagined may be near, but not because of the surveillance state or contraptions built by Silicon Valley giants that rob us of our privacy or most intimate moments alone. It is we, not our technical creations, who are to blame for failing to encourage and enable the radical act of belief in something above and beyond, and external to, the self.” You mean, like Big Brother?

In addition to skittish technologists who don’t want to work on the “American project,” Karp sees the villains in the nation as those who don’t want a religion to be central to American life—I’m pretty sure he’s not talking about Islam—and the people who have attempted to “dismantle the conception of American or Western identity.” So, the bad guys are those who want a pluralist nation inclusive of all.

Karp is correct in saying that the twenty-first century is a software era, and the battles of the future will be won by the country with the best coders. But his version of the America he claims he wants to protect might be unrecognizable to you. Ultimately, who is Karp’s “democratic world” for? It’s certainly not for Palestinians¹³ who are currently being besieged in Gaza, as Palantir has played a role in what appear to be war crimes committed by Israel. And maybe not for a lot of us, either.

The most telling line of the book makes clear that his vision of America would play out like a zero-sum game. “We must, as a culture, make the public square safe again for substantive notions of the good or virtuous life, which, by definition, exclude some ideas in order to put forward others.” Some ideas may need to be excluded to bring about Karp’s vision. Some people’s rights might be stepped on. One of them may be you.•

1. Leary spoke about embracing technology during his 1976 post-prison comeback tour, as reported in John Riley’s People article, “Timothy Leary Is Free, Demonstrably in Love and Making Extraterrestrial Plans.” The piece appears to have been scrubbed from the publication’s archive, but a key quote captures the thrust of his message: “After six years of silence, we have three new ideas which we think are fairly good. One is space migration. Another is intelligence increase. The third is life extension.”

2. Charles Mills was reportedly so wasted on Benzedrine that he was refused admission to Carnegie Hall when his Crazy Horse Symphony premiered there.

3. In 1990, Susan Leary Martino hanged herself with her shoelaces in a Los Angeles jail cell, where she was in custody after shooting her sleeping boyfriend. She died two days later while on life support.

4. Rosemary tried to bankroll the escape plot by holding a fundraiser at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village in 1970, but things reportedly went sideways when Allen Ginsberg’s Ohm-ing angered Yippie bigwig Abbie Hoffman. Most of the audience left before the main act, Jimi Hendrix, took the stage—though Jim Morrison, who had decided not to read his poetry that night, stayed to watch the set.

5. Like the Learys, Eldridge Cleaver spent some fugitive time in Paris before settling in Algeria. In the French capital, he worked as a fashion designer and created “Penis Pants”—trousers with a sock attached at the crotch so the wearer’s genitalia could be “worn” on the outside. He explained the style to the Harvard Crimson, claiming the “slightly obscene” pants were a riposte to the unisex trend: “Well these pants look like a regular pair of men’s pants except around the groin, you know?” Cleaver said. “In a conventional pair of pants the penis gets tucked behind the pants, you know?” He imitated a tucking motion with his hands. “But in these pants, the penis is held in a sheath of cloth that sticks outside of the pants.”

6. Some of Leary’s cremains were blasted into space in 1997 so that he could posthumously “explore” the final frontier. According to the New York Times, he had good company on his final trip: “Also aloft in the world’s first space funeral were fragments of Gene Roddenberry, who created the Star Trek television series; Gerard O’Neill, a space physicist; and scientists and pilots.”

7. Leary’s papers were purchased by the library in 2011 for $900,000.

8. The most infamous example of Bellow’s racial insensitivity is his purported question to a journalist: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” He later defended himself in a 1994 opinion piece in The New York Times: “I had come under attack in the press and elsewhere for a remark I was alleged to have made about the Zulus and the Papuans. I had been quoted as saying that the Papuans had had no Proust and that the Zulus had not as yet produced a Tolstoy, and this was taken as an insult to Papuans and Zulus, and as a proof that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist—in a word, a monster.”

9. Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2022 nonfiction title, The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, is a graphic and excellent history of how modern cosmetic surgery has been greatly influenced by the treatments developed by Harold Gillies to treat the horrific facial injuries endured by soldiers in the war.

10. From a report in the May 30, 2025 New York Times: “In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”

11. In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an unethical series of experiments in which an authority figure ordered volunteers to turn a knob and deliver electric shocks to a “learner” in the next room who could be heard screaming in pain. The volunteers didn’t know that they were not actually delivering jolts and that the person receiving them was an actor. Roughly 65% of the volunteers were talked into going along with administering increasing voltage even when it rose to lethal levels. One of the volunteers who refused to harm the “learner,” Alan C. Elms, wrote of the experience in Jewish Currents in 2004: “Like many others in the New Haven area, I answered an ad seeking subjects for the experiment and offering five dollars, paid in advance, for travel and time. At the Yale facility, I met a man who looked very professorial in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses. He led me into a room filled with an impressive display of electrical equipment. A second man was introduced to me as another subject for the experiment, and together we were told that the experiment was to test the widely held belief that people learn by punishment. In this case, one of us would be a ‘learner’ and the other a ‘teacher.’ The teacher would read a list of paired words to the learner and then repeat the first word of the pair. If the learner did not respond with the correct second word, the teacher would deliver a ‘mild’ electric shock to the learner as punishment.

This struck me as bizarre, and although the instructions were in accord with what we had been told, I wondered if something else was going on.”

12. Karp presents each new Palantir employee with a copy of British-Canadian playwright Keith Johnstone’s 1979 book, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Johnstone’s 2023 New York Times obituary notes that, in 1959, he co-directed—along with William Gaskill—a largely improvised one-night show called Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp, featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. He hardly seems like someone who would have approved of Palantir’s use in modern warfare.

13. An October 2024 Reuters article highlighted the unease some investors have had about Palantir’s involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian war: “One of the Nordic region’s largest investors, Storebrand, has sold its holdings in Palantir Technologies because of concerns that the U.S. data firm’s work for Israel might put the asset manager at risk of violating international humanitarian law and human rights.”