“Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber”
Oh frabjous day! I noted with great excitement the following post from “Digital Eccentric,” Leslie Johnston:
I was initially very excited by the announcement on BoingBoing that The Atlantic had opened its archive. I read the Editor's Note describing the decision. I followed the link to start my exploration. It's a little misleading. The _site_ is now open to all. They have "Unbound" (web only) content and full issues back to 1995 open. But their other free content seems to be selected material.
Back in 2000, after having survived the terrible and great Y2K (!@#), I read a fascinating article by Alston Chase on the childhood and college experiences of one Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski: the Unabomber. It humanizes him in a way that may have you screaming “darned bleeding-heart apologist, how dare you!” and puts his actions in a context where they actually, gulp, make some sense. This is not to excuse his actions; rather, it is a glimpse into how an otherwise rational and normal (if brilliant) man transformed into a monster:
In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard?