Chapter Five
Swift judgment is a necessary ingredient in the formation of cooperative societies. Not being able to distinguish us versus them, friend versus foe, led to the fall of Troy and other historical maladies.
–Dr. Abigail Rosen, The F Word: Femininity in the New Century
In college, Mitch had discovered many unforeseen pleasures in writing programming code. At its most basic, coding could be distilled down to a procession of orderly and contained logical problems, each of which brought a sizzle of satisfaction when solved. With a few keystrokes, a solution was either verified or invalidated with an addictive immediacy. After a long, productive session, Mitch began to equate the keyboard to those levers in lab experiments that, when pressed, sent bolts right to the test subject’s
