The Decline and Fall of the Information State (For Now)

For the most part, I relished my eight years as staff writer for Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. I hadn’t taken a STEM course since high school, but it was deeply satisfying to help world-class scientists and engineers — brilliant at so many things, but not communication — explain and emphasize the exciting implications of their very boring incremental research. For my first number of years working there, beginning in 2013, Columbia Engineering was essentially apolitical, a most refreshing contrast to the strident dogmatism running rampant almost everywhere else on campus.