This is a valuable portrait of the Yale professor who is famously hard to describe ("technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target"), who "occupies a unique spot in American intellectual life, at the intersection of technology, art, politics, and religion," and who always, always makes me think.

Andy:

In an unusual and overlooked epilogue to Mirror Worlds, Gelernter imagined two fictional professors—his alter egos: a composer and an electrical engineer—walking and talking in the woods north of Yale’s campus. “Remember running, when you were a kid, just for the hell of it? Just for fun?” asks the technologist. “That’s why we do technology … it feels great, it’s the human thing to do.” But the humanist remains wary. “I’ve never said the possibilities aren’t tantalizing,” he counters. “All I’m saying is that the dangers are also frightening. I’m saying I’m worried and you’re saying sorry, I can’t help it.”

So how did a techno-skeptic awash in nostalgia for a less high-tech age become, in the words of The New York Times, a “rock star” in the world of computer science? “It was natural in the sense that computers were never remote or frightening,” Gelernter says. His father, Herbert, is a professor emeritus of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. “I turned to computer science to make a living, but I also did it in the belief that, if I did not depend on painting and writing for income, I would be free to paint and write what I chose.” In Drawing Life, Gelernter dropped an aside that provides a key for entering his thought. In retrospect, he wrote, one of the reasons he wound up in computer science was his dislike of “intellectuals”—and his unwillingness to be one.

Gelernter traffics in ideas, but he despises intellectuals and blames them for irreparably degrading American culture. “Stop any person on the street and ask them to name a living poet, a living painter, or a living composer. There will be complete silence,” Gelernter says. “When I was a child, artists were heroes. Everyday people knew Robert Frost’s poems, and not only people like me, a respected Yale professor. Classical music was moving closer to the middle class, Leonard Bernstein concerts were broadcast on television. It was a marvelous thing to have poets, novelists, painters, and musicians representing the middle and working classes and giving them greater and greater artistic depth. All of this,” he says, sweeping his arm through the air, “was killed or at least dealt a very serious blow by the encroachment of the universities.”