“We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live. Sudden disaster–the death of a loved one, the loss of a vital job, a murder, a meltdown at a nearby nuclear reactor–breaks that picture and we have to try to reconstruct it, or something like it, or something completely different.”
Salman Rushdie, “A Sundering,” in Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life (2025), 271.
He would say something like but gravity isn’t political, and Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 – that’s fact, not interpretation. And I would say, yes, gravity itself the physical force isn’t political, but how we come to research and understand and then harness it absolutely is political, distributed by human relationships and negotiations of power. And while Benjamin Franklin was indeed born, that we choose to frame the event as such reflects our priorities; we could instead note that Abiah Folger Franklin labored long in a period of high maternal mortality to deliver the eighth of her 10 children, whom she named Benjamin. These were the kinds of conversations we had, my dad and I, scientist to humanist, secure in the parameters of a world committed to knowledge.
My father, an early and prominent computer scientist, passed away more than two years ago. Since then I’ve been trying to make sense of how rapidly the world that helped make him, and in turn the one he helped shape, is unraveling. Like many Americans of my generation, I have parents who lived their lives in the wake of World War II and all that the war’s end meant for the United States – what we convinced ourselves we were committed to at home and around the world. An academic, entrepreneur, public servant, and leader, my dad believed as deeply in America as he did in science – and in the inexhaustible value of higher education and scientific research for the nation. Child of an immigrant father, he invested wholly in what he was certain made the US great: the historic partnerships among academic, government, and industry institutions that were part of a post-war commitment to expanding opportunity, and to keeping the US at the economic and innovation pinnacle. This sense of national interest and national purpose was just as deeply rooted in an ideal of global collaboration.1
These broad commitments and the structures to underpin them were blown forward from the mid- into the late twentieth century by gale force political winds. As a historian, I loved talking with my dad about that context, and how those winds might change. Now that they have, grieving his death feels inextricably tangled with grieving the catastrophe now overtaking the world he believed in.