When I was a child, I did not know the phrase Gaussian distribution. I only sensed that some hidden pattern hovered over the classroom, quietly arranging…
When I picture the small testing room, I do not see a church. I see chalk dust, a blackboard, a row of child-sized chairs, a plain table, a stack of…
I begin this part of the journey with two small scenes. In one, I picture a boy in a German doorway, sounding out scripture in his own language while his…
Once I begin to see that the maze was made rather than given, I cannot help asking whether the road that led into it was ever inevitable. I have come to…
In the previous chapter, I suggested that the algorithm has begun to function like a new priesthood: a mediator of judgment, calm, technical, and often…
When I think about the age of algorithms, I keep returning to a set of ordinary rooms at night. In one, a woman sits at her kitchen table, lit by the soft…
For a time, the market’s right to dictate mass suffering seemed to have been checked. That was the old promise at the heart of many rich societies after…
As I move through this history of divine power, I keep returning to one thought: great ruling stories rarely disappear all at once. The promise explored…
That sense that economic arrangements can be changed, and need not be worshipped as fate, leads me naturally to Roosevelt in the winter of 1944. I…
If the last chapter paused at the moment when invisible thrones trembled, this one steps back to one of the shocks that made that trembling possible. When…
As I move through the long history of divine power, one pattern keeps returning: elites are shaken, but rarely displaced for long. Thrones fall, yet the…
As I move through this history of divine power, I come to the moment when the old faith in steam, competition, and self-correcting markets begins to fray.…
