Republican Machines

Fifteen summers ago, as Obama’s first term was waning, I was newly eighteen and driving up I-75 through a thunderstorm to join my brother as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. What was I to do at school? Both girls I met at freshman orientation were predental. Pennants everywhere advertised UF’s primacy in engineering. The energy then was directed toward that or the life sciences, so in my first semester, I spent fifteen hours a week in a neurology lab, sorting fruit flies under a microscope, freezing them in liquid nitrogen, and pureeing their sliced-off heads.