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Archaeologists Found a Legendary Set of Golden Armor Many Thought Didn’t Exist
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Archaeologists Found a Legendary Set of Golden Armor Many Thought Didn’t Exist
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a69797512/xenobots-conscious-cells/
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For nearly two decades, the highly selective startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) kick-started what would become some of the most popular apps on your smartphone. The venture capital fund-meets-ideas lab incubated well-known companies across a range of industries, like DoorDash, Coinbase, Airbnb, Instacart, Reddit and Gusto.
Silicon Valley Goes To War
The tech industry’s whiz kids once promised convenience at your fingertips. Now they’re embracing the military-industrial complex to defend the West.
Then, in August 2024, it diverged from its consumer-facing portfolio and, for the first time in its history, underwrote the weapons company Ares Industries. The El Segundo, Calif.-based defense startup’s goal is to build low-cost anti-ship cruise missiles to help Washington win a hypothetical war against China in the Taiwan Strait. The one-line YC bio, no longer visible on the website, for Ares cofounder Alex Tseng previously read: “Missiles are cool.”
War drones are unlikely to be what most people picture when they think of the Silicon Valley that led the consumer internet revolution. Since the 2000s, America’s tech companies have pioneered the idea that their digital innovations don’t just provide convenience but also create a global village that is “more open and connected,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it. Big tech went all-in on this progressive ethos, which it also used to market its work as transcending borders and delivering a global public good: democratizing information, building connections and spurring creativity. For years, the Valley shied away from military technology. But that was then.
Today, YC’s increasing investment in defense tech startups is a microcosm of a broader industry shift — from building consumer and business applications to now embracing the technology of warfare. Such a shift for a respected incubator that attracts the crème de la crème of startup offerings is exemplary of the industry’s multi-year shift toward investing in warfare tech; it’s gone mainstream. While tech companies once downplayed their military contracts, the defense tech sector’s loudest voices now argue that their focus must move from consumer diversions to defending their nation.
Alex Karp, who founded Palantir in 2003 alongside entrepreneur Peter Thiel and others, bemoaned in a new book co-written with the company’s legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska, that Silicon Valley has “lost its way” for viewing the U.S. government as “an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy.” The country’s best engineers worked on delivery apps when they could’ve contributed to America’s military strength.
Silicon Valley has apparently begun to wake up, as investments and valuations in defense tech have ballooned. In just five years, from 2019 to 2024, venture capital investment in U.S. defense-tech startups grew more than 10 times, reaching around $3 billion, according to Crunchbase data.
This past year alone, the Austin, Texas-based Saronic Technologies, founded in 2022, raised $600 million to build AI-powered autonomous warships. And Shield AI, founded in 2015, raised $240 million to scale its autonomy software suite for AI-powered military drones and aircraft systems; the San Diego-based company is now valued at $5.3 billion. Venture capital deals in defense tech startups have reached a record high in 2025, with valuations doubling from the previous year, according to PitchBook estimates.
There are many similar success stories across the sector. The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Anduril Industries recently raised another $2.5 billion to replace traditional defense contractors with modernized commercial tech. Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, the $30.5-billion Anduril is building a $1 billion weapons factory in Ohio. Another defense tech sweetheart, Palantir, which provides analytics software to the U.S. military and law enforcement, was added to the S&P 500 index in September 2024.
Such an alliance between the Pentagon and American tech firms is not new; in fact, it’s a legacy of the Cold War era. Though tech entrepreneurs have often waxed nostalgic about their supposed libertarian origin stories, big government subsidies through defense budgets and federal research grants helped fund much of the era’s innovation.
Stanford University, under engineering dean and then provost Fred Terman, made the most of postwar America’s growing military-industrial complex: The university became a top federal grant recipient and a major supplier of scientific talent for defense projects. Security anxieties among officials at the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission resulted in government cash injections that provided resources for education and research without near-term commercial pressure. In 1951, Stanford received less than $2 million from government contracts and federal grants. Nearly a decade later, in 1960, as the space race against the Soviet Union intensified, that number more than quadrupled to $8.3 million. Stanford had effectively become what historian Rebecca S. Lowen called the “cold war university.”
“For years, the Valley shied away from military technology. But that was then.”
Defense contracts also became the backbone of the region’s industry. The Stanford Research Institute, founded in 1946, separated from the university in 1970 and later rebranded as SRI International, produced early computing research for defense clients. Varian Associates, incorporated by Stanford physicists and others, made klystrons for radar and military communications.
By the time the so-called “traitorous eight” employees left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, the cutting edge of semiconductor development — the technology that became Silicon Valley’s namesake — was in satellites and missile guidance systems.
Before the personal computer industry took over, Santa Clara County’s largest employer was none other than Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. The Southern California aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Corporation (which would later merge with Martin Marietta in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin) opened an outpost in Sunnyvale in 1956, where it designed classified satellites and missiles for America’s Cold War arsenal.
Skepticism of military technology did grow, however, amid the 1960s counterculture. Northern Californians, including students at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford, protested the region’s military-industrial complex’s design of killing machines for use in an unjust war in Vietnam. In addition to pacifist calls to end the war, the media historian Fred Turner describes in his book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” how the era’s activists feared that technological systems of command and control, while built for use against foreign enemies, would turn into tools of authoritarian hierarchy and bureaucratic centralization for use against democratic Americans.
Rather than rejecting technology altogether, a group of counterculture figures sought to take tools with military origins — psychedelics, radios, computers — from the Leviathan. In fighting wars, computers might’ve been built for command and control, but when packaged for the everyday consumer, they could become platforms for creativity and individualism.
In 1975, Silicon Valley hobbyists, including the antiwar computer engineer Lee Felsenstein and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, convened as the informal Homebrew Computer Club to experiment with small, portable computers for personal use. While the precursor to the internet was developed with defense funding, this group of hobbyists — part of a movement that Turner has referred to as New Communalism — saw computer networks not as a communication technology for the battlefield, but as a self-organized community of personal expression.
As the Cold War came to an end, a new generation of engineers who called themselves hackers wanted cyberspace to be open, globally accessible and free from government intervention. They protested U.S. export controls on encryption algorithms, which they believed to be a public good. They also opposed the Clinton administration’s adoption of the Clipper Chip, a government backdoor in communication devices, in the name of national security.
By the end of the century, cyberlibertarian political activist John Perry Barlow declared that cyberspace — which had only 13 years earlier been a Department of Defense special project — must be free from government control. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wrote.
The early days of consumer internet were marked by an anti-authoritarian, anti-military culture. Multibillion-dollar companies publicly shied away from military work, which was seen as regressive and low-status. Google’s unofficial motto, until it transformed into Alphabet in 2018, was “don’t be evil.” Concern for the ethics of technology might have been lip service, but tech workers tried to hold them accountable. In 2018, after Google announced Project Maven, which aimed to use AI to analyze drone images for the Pentagon, more than 4,000 employees protested the effort, arguing that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and some resigned. Faced with internal dissent, the company did not renew its Maven contract.
A Return To The Past
Despite the antagonism to defense tech, Silicon Valley’s role in the military-industrial complex persisted well into the 21st century. Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 to fight the war on terror and continues to provide intelligence analytics software for the military and law enforcement. Tech giants like Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp. have continued to profit off defense work, and software companies like Google and Microsoft actively pursue military and intelligence contracts. The revelations of the Snowden leaks further showed the complicity of American tech companies in the nation’s ever-expanding digital surveillance apparatus. After Maven, Google’s military work resumed quietly. In 2021, the company agreed to work on Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract for the Israeli military, despite internal concerns that the program could enable human rights abuses in the West Bank.
“An alliance between the Pentagon and American tech firms is not new; in fact, it’s a legacy of the Cold War era.”
While military technology was treated as taboo in the 2000s and 2010s, the Valley now openly embraces its military roots. Once-attractive consumer-facing technologies like online marketplaces, digital advertising, social media and gig work apps have become increasingly saturated, despite their fast growth in the 2010s. “Perhaps there aren’t as many big breakthroughs left in consumer internet. The big ideas have been tried,” observed the venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder Thiel in 2018.
But as the U.S. finds itself enmeshed in hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a great-power rivalry with China, tech companies have identified future profits from public-private partnerships enabled by an ever-growing U.S. defense budget. “There is more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S. military vehicle; better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns; and, until 2019, the United States’ nuclear arsenal operated off floppy disks,” an Anduril blog post in 2022 stated.
Venture capitalists once shied away from defense tech partly because they couldn’t see themselves playing the insider’s game against traditional contractors. Today, most U.S. defense contracts go to a handful of manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp., and The Boeing Company. By contrast, today, less than 1% of the total Department of Defense budget goes to the top 100 venture-backed defense tech companies, according to the Silicon Valley Defense Group. In 2025, these companies raised far more in private capital — more than $70 billion — than in federal awards, which have so far totaled $29 billion.
Read Noema in print.
Silicon Valley’s response is to move fast and break things. To disrupt the existing defense sector, it’ll have to revive the era of competition that was put to bed in 1993. That was when the Clinton administration’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, hosted the infamous “Last Supper” and told defense contractors’ executives that the industry must consolidate or it would not survive. The number of large defense contractors dropped from more than 50 to just five today.
“Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have [sic] given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD,” lamented Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who wants defense-tech companies to innovate and scale rapidly in what he called the era of the “First Breakfast,” a spin on the earlier “Last Supper.” The absence of competition among weapons makers, he argued, had weakened America’s ability to resurrect an industrial base. “We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market,” he wrote.
But venture capitalists now see a window of opportunity. Since 2022, the war in Ukraine has put venture-backed defense products to the test, sometimes through private funding and donations. The Pentagon now wants to be a “true innovation ecosystem,” according to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who led the establishment of the Office of Strategic Capital in 2022 under President Biden to secure private-sector investment in defense tech. Austin wants to conquer the “valley of death,” the long, suffocating gap between military innovation in the private sector and the government contracts that take years to arrive.
Then came the 2024 election, which brought Silicon Valley onto Capitol Hill. The alignment between the tech industry’s most vocal conservatives and the Trump administration has taken Californian disruptors to Washington. Chief among them was, of course, Elon Musk, whose aerospace company SpaceX is now the Pentagon’s top rocket provider. On the eve of President Trump’s June parade commemorating the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, the U.S. Army swore in four tech executives — including Sankar, who had suggested the idea of an army innovation corps of corporate advisors in the first place — as lieutenant colonels, with the hopes of bringing their tech expertise to the future of warfare.
The Democracy Paradox
To Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, it’s not worth crying over dissipating opportunity in areas like social media. He has long believed that, despite its modern importance, the internet has failed to deliver the kind of technological progress seen in most of the 20th century. “We were promised flying cars,” his famous mantra went, “and instead, we got 140 characters.”
Thiel’s view has been echoed by the economist Tyler Cowen, who believes that the U.S. has largely been stagnant in scientific and technological progress since the 1970s. In 1969, man landed on the Moon; by 1976, the supersonic airliner flew passengers between New York and London. As the stagnation hypothesis went, the digital revolution over the last five decades was remarkable, but outside of it, development in the hard sciences — in manufacturing, energy, transportation and biotechnology — has stalled.
“The early days of consumer internet were marked by an anti-authoritarian, anti-military culture.”
While the U.S. seems to have slowed in these areas, China appears to have accelerated. It is quickly surpassing the U.S. in electric vehicles, robotics, batteries and drones. It has made significant breakthroughs in satellites and nuclear reactors, and its biotech industry is advancing its development of innovative drugs at an unprecedented pace. Despite U.S. export controls, Beijing is on its way to achieving self-reliance in critical technologies such as advanced semiconductors.
Many in the tech industry anticipate that an arms race with China will spur new technological innovation not just in areas such as weapons manufacturing and cybersecurity, but also in emerging technology beyond the traditional parameters of military defense. In a widely circulated 2024 essay titled “Situation Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner argued that the AI arms race against China would be the decisive factor in whether the U.S. maintains its military supremacy, and that it’s crucial for the U.S. to achieve superintelligence, or AGI, before Beijing. “The free world,” the German researcher Aschenbrenner wrote, “must prevail over the authoritarian powers in this race.” For Aschenbrenner, the safety challenges posed by AGI can only be mitigated by liberal democracies sustaining a “healthy lead” vis-à-vis Washington’s adversaries.
But there is no definitive evidence that AGI is among Beijing’s top strategic priorities. Close observers of Chinese policy have noted that supply chain self-dependence and diffusion of AI across industries, not the abstract frontier of superintelligence, are the country’s paramount concerns. But Aschenbrenner’s unsubstantiated thesis of a decisive arms race has been taken up by China hawks in both California and Washington. Jacob Helberg, formerly a senior advisor at Palantir and now an undersecretary of state in the Trump administration, believes that “China is racing towards AGI … It’s critical that we take them extremely seriously.” In November 2024, the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, where Helberg served as a commissioner, advised Congress to fund “a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.”
America’s AI companies agree. “It is critically important that the U.S. maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values,” read Sam Altman’s first message to Trump after his victory in November. In response to the “DeepSeek moment” in January, Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei called for continued U.S. export restrictions to prevent Chinese models from accessing advanced chips. Despite DeepSeek’s success, he wrote, it is “beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they’re able to match the U.S. in AI.” Export controls, he stressed, “serve a vital purpose: keeping democratic nations at the forefront of AI development.”
(In July, Amodei reportedly sought investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, a decision he was “not thrilled about” but justified as necessary. “‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” he wrote in an internal memo.) President Trump has since loosened these export controls. In December, he allowed Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to China — in a sharp, controversial reversal from previous U.S. policy.
The patriotism among the Silicon Valley set may be genuine, but it is nonetheless self-serving. On his second day in office, Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture between Oracle, SoftBank Group Corp. and Altman’s OpenAI to build AI datacenters in the U.S., with a planned investment of $500 billion — an astronomical figure — by 2029.
The narrative of an arms race conveniently supports these tech evangelists’ quest for unconditional technological progress — a moral vision that has also been recently pushed forward by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen. A self-identified effective accelerationist, he believes that progress in science and technology must be achieved at all costs, dismissing normative concerns about sustainability, social responsibility and tech ethics.
“Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation — the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death,” Andreesen wrote in the widely circulated “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” published in October 2023.
Unlike the quiet collaborations we’ve seen over the first two decades of the century, many in the Valley are now proudly supporting America’s military rejuvenation. Andreessen, who in the mid-1990s gave us the then-most popular web browser Netscape, defended America’s technological strength: “Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.”
“Unlike the quiet collaborations we’ve seen over the first two decades of the century, many in the Valley are now proudly supporting America’s military rejuvenation.”
Palantir’s Karp went one step further, claiming the company’s core mission “always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity.” Alexandr Wang, the Los Alamos-born Scale AI co-founder who recently joined Meta as its chief AI officer, believes deploying AI for U.S. national security is a “moral imperative.”
OpenAI, which had restricted the use of its products for “weapons development” and “military and warfare,” removed this clause from its usage policies in early 2024 and secured a $200 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense last June. That same month, Anthropic also announced its new Claude Gov model to bring artificial intelligence to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. In February 2025, Google removed language from its AI principles that had been in place since 2018, stating it would not deploy AI weapons or technological systems that violate international law and human rights.
“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” Google wrote in a blog post following the removal. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights.”
Yet this moralistic rhetoric — that it’s imperative to defend U.S. technological primacy to ensure autocrats won’t use technology for oppression — reveals an inconvenient paradox. While it is evident that China’s use of technology for surveillance, control and repression is deeply concerning, the moral imperative of the U.S. to prevent the nation state’s abuses is eroded by the fact that U.S. companies have profited from similar practices. At home, Palantir is building surveillance and identification tools in the service of Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Like the Chinese tech companies that help the Communist Party surveil its dissidents and control its Muslim minorities, Silicon Valley is now enabling the buildup of America’s own police state.
Tech leaders in the U.S. are worried about propaganda and censorship in AI systems, should the systems that succeed be under Chinese control; however, U.S.-controlled AI systems are already vulnerable to political manipulation. Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok has cosplayed as Hitler and forced the narrative of “white genocide” in South Africa into repeated responses. More recently, as TikTok sold its U.S. business to American investors, including President Trump’s billionaire ally Larry Ellison, concerns about potential censorship — not from the Chinese this time, but from the U.S. — have surfaced.
Abroad, U.S. companies like Microsoft continue to supply cloud computing and AI services to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, despite humanitarian concerns in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Such applications of emerging technology, condemned almost universally by human rights groups, hardly resemble the liberal-democratic values the tech industry’s militarists have vowed to defend. American technology companies want to boost national competitiveness, but in the age of Trump, many have cozied up to an administration that, according to its critics, frequently violates democratic values.
Today, America’s best and brightest find themselves drawn to working on what might be advertised as the next Manhattan Project. Venture capitalists are nostalgic about the technological progress made amid the Cold War. As historical episodes of McCarthyism and the possibilities of nuclear apocalypse have shown, technological militarism has real perils. The moral gravity of actions or errors can be far greater than a glitch on a smartphone app. Simply brushing away these worries with flag-waving nationalism is unlikely to advance democracy or accountability.
We’re at a time when America’s foundational institutions are facing existential risks; however enthusiastic one might be for a world where democratic technologies dominate, that future is jeopardized by the illiberal means to get there. That said, one thing is clear: The Silicon Valley that once wanted to bring the world together appears to be no more. With the rise of techno-nationalism, we may soon reminisce fondly about those bygone days when college dropouts vowed to “make the world a better place” — however naïve those aspirations turned out to be.
A Creature of the Sea Found the Secret to Immortality—and Humans Might Be Able to Steal It
‘We are all always coming and going’
Steve Schwartzberg’s journey from Harvard psychologist to erotic healer, Buddhist and teacher was always haunted by death. Then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer
Summer was waning and the sand was cool as Steve Schwartzberg sat alone on the beach beside Captain Jack’s Wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A Monday morning stillness had replaced the weekend bustle of shirtless men and drag queens sauntering down nearby Commercial Street, where dour Puritans had first stepped ashore four centuries before. Now it was the bright pink heart of New England’s gay mecca.
As he looked over the bay, the slim, youthful, dark-haired man dropped into a mental reverie. ‘I was just a horny 40-something gay man having fun in Ptown,’ he recalled. Then, as he basked in the rising sun, a voice like ‘an inner megaphone’ interrupted the reverie.
The message was as clear as the calm September morning in 2002: ‘Open your life.’
Schwartzberg was outwardly successful, with numerous friends, and unencumbered by debt, a partner or children. A clinical psychologist on the faculty of a mental hospital affiliated with Harvard, he had a private practice in Cambridge, MA and could afford to rent a pricey apartment on summer weekends. Yet he harboured a vague but persistent anxiousness.
As he pondered the stark message, his accomplishments seemed anything but meaningful. ‘People lead all kinds of lives and then they die,’ he thought. ‘There are no rules, only suggestions.’
Schwartzberg wasn’t sure how he would do it, but at that moment he decided to step off his conventional path and take a brief sabbatical. ‘I had zero idea that I was taking the next 18 years off,’ he told me. That journey would turn him into a globe-roving sexual healer and spiritual guide.
He could not have chosen a more fitting site to begin his unusual quest. Captain Jack’s Wharf had been known in the 1930s as ‘whoopie wharf’ for the sexual shenanigans within the ramshackle cottages perched on the pier. ‘The whole lunatic fringe of Manhattan is here,’ Tennessee Williams told a friend in 1944.
This was a place where the power of erotic performance and introspection had long come together above the rise and fall of Cape Cod Bay. Captain Jack’s Wharf, he said recently with a laugh, was ‘also where Steve Schwartzberg discovered God.’
Most of us daydream about a free-spirited life, unmoored from traditional notions of success and respectability. Steve Schwartzberg is that exceedingly rare person who made the leap, abandoning the life of a mental health professional to wrestle with his identity, unearth hidden desires, and seek spiritual meaning. He then shared what he had learned, emerging as a creative erotic healer, a maverick Buddhist, and a generous teacher drawn to probe the mysteries of mortality even as he approached his own demise.
Looking back, there are a few clues tied to sex and death that hint at the radical direction his life would eventually take. Schwartzberg’s Jewish parents joined the postwar exodus from Brooklyn for the fledgling Long Island suburbs a year after his birth in 1958. The town was a mix of middle-class Protestants, Catholics and Jews. His father was in the building supply business, and his mother – a legal secretary – hired a decorator who filled their modest split-level home with modern art and French provincial furniture.
While his brother Mark, two years older, was outside playing ball, the younger Schwartzberg would reposition his single bed, two dressers and desk, then stand on the threshold with his hands on his hips to judge the aesthetics of the new arrangement. Two or three times a day, he would envision changing into a fabulous new dress and matching hairdo. He adopted a gait to accommodate imaginary high heels and struck dramatic poses. ‘In pictures, I look like I’m imitating the German supermodel Veruschka,’ he said.
His parents tolerated what he calls his ‘incredibly faggy behaviour’, but it was less accepted outside the home. In first grade, he was scolded for his odd way of walking. Until the fifth or sixth grades, he delighted in all things feminine. The result was ‘shame, humiliation, and guilt. I was deeply homophobic. It was all very fu..ed up. Today I would have tracked as trans.’
College gave Schwartzberg a chance to channel his childhood love of outfits and personas
Strong believers in education and culture, his parents took their two sons to museums and Broadway shows, feeding Steve’s passion for entertainment and intellectual pursuits. Then in 1972, when Steve was 14, and in the throes of a puberty that was making him a man, Mark sickened and was hospitalised for three months.
His parents kept the diagnosis of leukaemia secret from Steve, telling only a few close friends and their rabbi as Mark endured brutal chemotherapy. When Mark finally came home in the summer of 1973 – gaunt and weak – he, Steve and their mother played board games until his strength gave out and he was hospitalised again. When the call came soon after that Mark had died, their mother stayed behind while their father took Steve to see the body – his vivid first encounter with death.
After the funeral, the family sat shiva for the required seven days, but Steve felt little solace in the ritual. ‘I developed an antipathy toward Reform Judaism, the way a teenager can reject his traditions,’ he said. His parents, once active in the local temple, also abandoned their faith. Saying Mark’s name became taboo. ‘They just couldn’t evoke his presence,’ he said. Though his parents would act normal during social occasions, with his mother adopting a ‘happy, perky, superficial’ mask, a stilted quality settled over the home that felt as if no one could get enough oxygen.
College gave Schwartzberg a chance to escape that stultifying atmosphere and to channel his childhood love of outfits and personas. At the University of Pennsylvania, he joined an acting group called the Mask and Wig Club. His quick wit later prompted him to partner with others to create the comedy troupe Mixed Nuts. They rode the growing popularity of the comedy club circuit in the early 1980s, opening for acts like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld that were just breaking big.
One night he was called to a gay club, where he danced on the shiny bar amid the screaming throng
But he also lived a secret second life, hovering around bathrooms where men had sex, before finally overcoming his fear and shame to engage in quick and anonymous encounters. His study of psychology was little help in coming to terms with his sexuality, but literature provided welcome insight. Patricia Nell Warren’s novel The Front Runner (1974), the story of a gay coach who confronts and ultimately overcomes hatred and prejudice, was particularly affecting. ‘Wait a second,’ he realised, ‘I’m not sick. The ones who say I’m sick are the really sick ones.’
The 1980s were perilous times for a young gay man. AIDS ravaged urban gay and bisexual communities, killing more than 8,000 men in Philadelphia alone, creating ‘the epidemic’s bleak terrain of loss’, as Schwartzberg’s book A Crisis of Meaning: How Gay Men Are Making Sense of AIDS (1996) would later put it. He threw himself into mental health triage, counselling victims and their friends, and eventually running an AIDS support group.
To make ends meet, he took advantage of his lithe figure, black curls and love of the stage to deliver striptease telegrams. At Secretary Day parties, Schwartzberg would don the clothes of a construction worker, a security guard or a cop, then disrobe down to red Speedo briefs with the company’s name stitched on the crotch. One night he was called to a gay club, where he danced on the shiny bar amid the screaming throng. ‘I was intoxicated with my own sexual power,’ he said.
When he turned 27, he concluded that he was wasting his life. He left Philadelphia, and went to psychology graduate school in western Massachusetts. His goal was to be taken seriously. By his mid-30s, Dr Schwartzberg was on the faculty at McLean Hospital, the famed Harvard-affiliated mental institution outside Boston. He had started a private practice and thrown himself into a passionate but tumultuous relationship that didn’t last. His clinical research led to his 1996 book describing how some suffering gay men accepted the paradox of living while dying, achieving what he called ‘remarkable transformations’ amid ‘the anguish of meaninglessness that weighs others down, the vapour of grief that hangs in the air.’
As he sat on the beach in Provincetown in 2002, Schwartzberg had already taken a first halting step off his traditional career path. Three years before, he’d attended a workshop at a bed and breakfast in rural New Hampshire. The course was part of the Body Electric School founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s by the ex-Jesuit Joseph Kramer. Amid the terror of the AIDS epidemic, Kramer pioneered a safe erotic-massage technique for men seeking a deeper connection with their bodies and sexuality. The organisation took its name from Walt Whitman’s stirring and homoerotic poem, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ (1855).
At the workshop’s concluding exercise, Schwartzberg lay on a massage table as two participants stroked his body while lyrical music played, and the facilitator banged on a drum. After 20 minutes of deep breathing, he exhaled sharply, and that’s when he met Jesus. ‘He was loving and welcoming,’ Schwartzberg recalls. ‘He was sitting on a throne and there was heavenly music playing.’ The experience rocked the world of this Jewish secular-minded psychologist.
Schwartzberg signed up for more Body Electric workshops, eager to explore the power of his erotic energy far removed from bathroom groping or one-night stands. He was particularly drawn to sacred intimacy, a practice that encouraged touch between practitioner and client as an alternative to talk therapy. He quickly perceived that he was a natural. ‘I was a mediocre psychologist, but I was a gifted sex healer,’ he explained. ‘My touch was centred on the other person, not like a vampire, but to enhance the other’s experience.’
For a psychologist trained in a field where sex with a client was a career-killing move, this was a revelation. Yet he’d felt unsure how to incorporate this newfound gift – until that morning on the beach. After he heard the ‘inner megaphone’ to open his life, Schwartzberg returned to Cambridge and transferred $20,000 from a fortuitous investment into a separate bank account to cover the cost of his planned sabbatical. At first, he felt hesitant. But, three months later, with his sense of urgency undiminished, he closed his practice, took a leave of absence from the hospital, rented out his apartment and psychotherapy office, and moved in with a friend.
‘I was going to be a prostitute. At 45, I was going to become a sex worker’
He immediately sought the advice of a local Body Electric facilitator on how to overcome his fears of opening his own sacred intimate practice. ‘I’m a prostitute,’ the longtime instructor bluntly told him. ‘I could dress it up by saying it is heart-centred and I’m providing erotic guidance, but I have sex with people, and I collect their money.’
The candour was refreshing. ‘I was going to be a prostitute,’ he said. ‘At 45, I was going to become a sex worker. I had been too scared to do it when I was doing striptease, but now it was time.’ He was eager to plug into what he calls the archetype of the sacred prostitute. ‘I felt honoured to be called into the mythic cadre of sex healers.’
Schwartzberg began to work with clients wherever he was staying, drawing on his sense of theatre to experiment with role-playing methods like domination, submission, and bondage. He found these approaches could break deeply held societal prohibitions – sex with family members, the boss, or a cop – without causing harm while increasing self-knowledge. ‘We all fantasise about breaking taboos,’ he reflected, ‘and this is a safe way to explore the edges to find healing.’
Each session had its own flavour. One long-term client wanted Schwartzberg to be a ‘pervy psychologist’ who would move from talk to hot sex, illuminating his deep-seated anxieties around authority. Another sought to be a better kisser. Others simply wished to be held as they related painful secrets. ‘If someone wanted to be physically or verbally abused, I would find ways to interrupt the session to say: “You are a beautiful human being.”’
Schwartzberg also set out on journeys around the world, travelling from Europe to India to Myanmar, sometimes alone and other times with a companion. Back in the United States, he stayed with friends or house-sat, rarely needing a hotel and taking advantage of all-you-can eat breakfasts to carry him through the day. His savings, small book royalties, and sacred intimate earnings covered his modest expenses. He also developed ‘a very robust and satisfying erotic life’ that was both casual and open-hearted. He enjoyed lovers around the world, from rural Vermont to gay-friendly Amsterdam, with no intention of turning them into long-term relationships.
He also embarked on inner journeys. In the Peruvian Amazon, he spent 10 days with a shaman drinking doses of ayahuasca, a potent brew containing the psychedelic dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. On the final trip, Schwartzberg tapped into the consciousness of ants, feeling their way of being that mingled individual with group consciousness. The experience opened a door into an alternative universe where ego was just an illusion.
Later, during an all-night psychedelic session in the Utah desert, a guide challenged Schwartzberg’s deep, existential mistrust, traced to youthful isolation, the tragic death of his brother, an early sexual trauma, and the AIDS plague. ‘That insight landed. I stayed awake much of the night, dancing through the desert, saying: “I love my suffering. I love my suffering.”’ Simply recognising the source of his habitual unhappiness lessened its grip.
The insights came at a high cost. ‘Steve always had tons of anxiety and was self-questioning,’ one close friend recalls of that period. ‘He was also a huge entertainer, who struggled with his desire to be the centre of attention – a trait he felt was neurotic.’ Schwartzberg recalls succumbing to ‘a kind of pathetic despair that I had fended off all my life.’ Without a structured life of work, ‘there were no guardrails, nothing to stop me from slipping.’
Within a year of starting his nomadic life, he fell into depression. ‘I didn’t yet have the psychological underpinnings to be messing with these substances,’ he said of his psychedelic use. ‘I went into the underworld.’ He linked it to a traumatic sexual experience soon after his brother’s death; he will say only that it was ‘absolutely horrifying’.
In 2004, stoned on a marijuana-laced cookie, Schwartzberg found himself writhing on the floor of a hotel room near the Ganges. Two friends present could do little to help. ‘Uncle! You win!’ he shouted at something dark he connected to the trauma. ‘Then,’ he recalls, ‘I felt this energy gather in and around my anus and then it lifted up and out.’ He sat up clearheaded, thinking: ‘Despair doesn’t work.’ The despair, he realised, had been a plea for rescue from his internal anguish.
Schwartzberg hadn’t believed in exorcism, but the encounter exposed him to the power of the unseen world. ‘It took another year or year and a half to purge myself completely, but I’ve never gone back to despair.’
‘There were no mantras, no vibrating bells. You just anchored yourself in your breath and noticed your stupid thoughts over and over again’
He drew on the Talmudic tale of four rabbis who enter the Garden of Eden: ‘One dies, one goes crazy, one can’t leave, and only one is able to navigate the ultimate truth and the relative world.’ He was determined to be the fourth rabbi. Soon after his experience in India, he committed to a daily meditation practice to work his way out of the mental and spiritual thicket in which he felt entangled.
Over the years, Schwartzberg had paid occasional visits to a Buddhist meditation group in Cambridge, MA. ‘There were no mantras, no visualisations, no vibrating bells. You just anchored yourself in your breath and noticed your stupid thoughts over and over again. The thoughts that you don’t pay attention to, but which probably cause you a lot of suffering – “You are such an idiot!” or “You are so great!” Or both, or “Oh, shut up.”’
At first, he couldn’t sit alone for more than five minutes without a paralysing fear that he would plunge into depression or resurface some old trauma. Yet, with his natural aversion to authority, he was reluctant to seek out a teacher. ‘I’m a rebellious student, and most gurus I’d met just fed their ego,’ he said.
Yet by 2007, nearing 50, he felt experienced enough to sign up for a silent retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in central Massachusetts. There he trained in the Theravada tradition, centred on meditation and close attention to experience as it unfolds, with Joseph Goldstein, the society’s co-founder. With Goldstein’s patient guidance, Schwartzberg learned to sit, focus on the breath, and detach from the busy mind with its constant demands, desires and addictions. He also learned to repeat a series of phrases such as ‘May I be safe,’ ‘May I be happy,’ and ‘May I be healthy,’ extending these affirmations to loved ones and, eventually, all beings. The practice – lovingkindness or metta meditation – is designed to expand one’s sense of empathy and connection.
Goldstein sensed Schwartzberg’s inner struggles. ‘My impression was that Steve was trying to reconcile different sides of himself,’ he says now. He encouraged Schwartzberg to give up psychedelic journeys for the more arduous but enduring benefits of meditation. And though the two didn’t discuss his erotic work, Goldstein offered a gentle caution, quoting a Burmese teacher, whose views were summed up with one simple phrase: ‘Lust cracks the brain.’
Schwartzberg did ease off his psychoactive drug use, but he expanded his erotic exploration. In 2005, he had joined the Body Electric faculty and soon found himself teaching the same workshop – Celebrating the Body Erotic – that had prompted his 1999 encounter with Jesus. By 2008, he took the radical step of integrating erotic and contemplative practices in a novel way. With his friend and colleague Michael Cohen, he launched an intensive week-long course for men at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center, tucked away in a remote valley of New Mexico and led by an abbess long supportive of the Body Electric School. They dubbed it ‘Touching the Heart of Stillness’.
Illustration of five people sitting cross-legged on mats, meditating in a row, wearing robes.
A morning bell called silent participants to the tatami-mat-covered Sutra Hall for hours of sitting and mindful walking. ‘Imagine your thoughts are trains leaving the station. Don’t get on the train,’ Schwartzberg would say. After a simple vegetarian lunch, participants adjourned to the zendo, a meeting room in an adjacent adobe building. Facilitators then broke the silence, providing instructions for randomly paired and group erotic touch and massage exercises, though with strict boundaries that precluded kissing or penetration. The purpose was to keep one’s body in the mix after long solo sits, and to experience the power of pleasure in connecting with oneself and others.
After dinner, Steve lectured on Theravada themes, telling stories drawing on Jewish sages as well as Christian mystics, and taking questions – what in Buddhist circles is known as a dharma talk. Then the men broke up into small groups, allowing individuals to compare notes on the day’s insights and challenges, before resuming silence until the next afternoon.
Schwartzberg liked to say there was no other workshop like it on the planet, and even old hands felt its edginess. ‘I was scared shitless,’ says Tom Kovach, Body Electric’s executive director, when he took the course for the first time. ‘But Steve is like a maestro who brings the orchestra together so that each instrument plays beautiful music.’ He also was notorious for dictating elaborate staging, and leading late-night staff meetings that often left his assistants exhausted.
One of his lasting realisations was that everything is fleeting, whether a feeling, a thought, or a life
All the while, Schwartzberg continued his peripatetic life as a queer modern-day mendicant with means – meditating, travelling, living with friends, working with intimate clients, and writing occasional pieces for The Huffington Post. At the Insight Meditation Society and centres in California, Nepal and India, he lengthened his silent sits from a few days to 10 days, then a month, and eventually three months.
As he submitted to a practice meant to calm the mind, minor inconveniences could flare into crises. When his glasses broke, ‘I freaked out.’ At an idyllic California retreat, he watched the bananas dwindle; when the man in front of him took the last one, he was inwardly incensed.
Such moments revealed the power of the ceaseless, disconnected thoughts coursing through him and the rigour required to notice, accept, and move beyond them. Over time, he embraced the Buddhist notion that the ego and the self – so central to his Western training as a psychologist – were delusions, and that interpersonal strife was self-hatred directed outward. For six months, he and Cohen attempted ‘right speech’, avoiding gossip or malice. ‘No dissing other people, no lying,’ Schwartzberg said. ‘It’s really hard – and really boring.’
One of his lasting realisations was the central Buddhist teaching that everything is fleeting, whether a feeling, a thought, or a life. This led him to explore his notions of mortality shaped by his brother’s death and by a generation of gay men. He took a Buddhist-oriented course on death and dying but was underwhelmed. ‘It felt too academic.’
With characteristic chutzpah, he decided he could do better, and designed his own workshop, a virtual seminar on how to approach the thought of one’s death ‘with more conscious ease’. He advertised ‘Unmasking Mortality: A Yearlong Practice in Living and Dying’ at the start of 2020.
Weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the planet. Fifty people immediately signed up for the Zoom course he could teach from an office at his housesitting gig outside Boston. Had he known then what he would soon learn, ‘I would have created a course on origami, or maybe how to take pretty nature pictures.’
I
On Memorial Day weekend in 2021, nine months into his mortality course, Schwartzberg went to a friend’s home for dinner. An energetic 62, he retained a wiry frame, cultivated abstemious habits, and had long enjoyed good health. That spring, however, he developed a wracking cough. His concerned dinner companion slipped a pulse oximeter on his finger. ‘I wasn’t concerned when it read 87 per cent – it seemed like getting a B+,’ Schwartzberg said. But when he informed his doctor, he was told not just to go to the emergency room, but to pack a bag.
Admitted to the hospital, other puzzling and debilitating symptoms quickly arose. Soon, he could not get out of bed unaided. ‘A few days later, out of the blue, I was told: “You have cancer,”’ he recalled. The diagnosis was adenocarcinoma, and the malignant tumours infesting his lungs had already spread to a dozen other parts of his body, including his brain. There was no cure. ‘I was told to put my affairs in order.’ Mortality had indeed unmasked itself in a sudden and personal way.
‘The story I had told myself my whole life is that I never got past stage one, that I was stuck in mistrust’
Schwartzberg had absorbed the Buddhist teaching that ageing, sickness and death were not harbingers of suffering but divine dispatches of spiritual insight. When Goldstein, his meditation mentor, sent an email noting that his terminal diagnosis marked a visceral encounter with one of these ‘heavenly messengers’, Schwartzberg bridled. ‘I was furious,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t ready to hear it.’ He found himself overwhelmed, anxious, and distressed. ‘I had overestimated my ability to embrace death as an abstract idea,’ he recalled. ‘I continued to carry the idea that I was exempt.’
After three weeks in the hospital, he was discharged back to his temporary home outside Boston. One night soon after, he awoke to the sound of his own voice. ‘I trust. I trust. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but I trust.’ He recalled that the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called trusting the first stage of individual growth. ‘And the story I had told myself my whole life is that I never got past stage one, that I was stuck in mistrust.’
But the utterance shattered the story that had made him dance in the Utah desert, and intense apprehension gave way to a level of acceptance. He found confirmation in a poem he came across in The New Yorker by Jane Mead, who’d died from cancer in 2019. ‘I wonder if I will miss the moss/after I fly off as much as I miss it now/just thinking about leaving,’ she wrote. ‘Yeah, I will have flown off,’ he thought, ‘but I don’t think I’m going to miss it.’
Schwartzberg was slated to undergo his first round of chemotherapy late that summer, and his physicians warned that the toxic chemicals could slow but not halt the cancer’s spread. Then, on the Friday night before the treatment was due to begin, his phone rang.
‘Guess what?’ said his oncologist, ‘you just won the golden ticket.’ The ticket was a new drug designed to combat his illness, but effective only with a particular genetic mutation that, fortuitously, was part of Schwartzberg’s DNA. All he had to do was swallow a single pill daily. ‘Within a week, I was already feeling better, and within a couple of months I was off oxygen,’ he recalled. ‘Within six weeks, I could walk up the stairs again.’
That recovery came with a caveat. The pill would work for a limited period of unknown duration. Yet with only relatively minor side effects, the drug gave back Schwartzberg most of his capacities. This sudden reprieve offered him a second chance. He embarked on a brief but passionate relationship, officiated at a wedding in a white linen suit, and offered online weekly meditation sessions. He also relaunched his ‘Heart of Stillness’ workshop as well as another, called ‘Erotic Temple’, made up of a series of interconnected rituals.
He rejected the mantle of teacher, much less guru, encouraging others to find their own path
Schwartzberg also softened toward his parents. He had always been a dutiful son, though somewhat at a remove since his brother’s death. When his father grew ill, their mutual looming mortality brought them together. ‘My father and I had had a contentious relationship, and I got very clean with him,’ he told me. ‘I was there with him on Zoom when he died, and ushered him into the transition.’ Schwartzberg also came closer to accepting his still-vital mother who loved him ‘deeply, insanely, pathologically, and beautifully’.
During this period following his diagnosis, colleagues noticed a profound change. ‘He was a different and fuller teacher with great kindness and compassion,’ Goldstein notes, adding that Schwartzberg ‘had a bit of a hard edge that softened; he felt, in some way, more integrated.’
Amid this change, Schwartzberg attracted eager students to his Zoom meditations and talks, but rejected the mantle of teacher, much less guru, encouraging others to find their own path. ‘I don’t recommend that anyone sell their house, quit their job, travel through India,’ he explained. The real work is for each person to find the trapdoor that leads into a deeper state of consciousness. That means subverting the ego, an entity ‘deputised to keep us safe and in control’.
By the spring of 2025, the daily pill’s magic had dwindled. While travelling to India’s holy city of Varanasi to visit the burning pyres of the Hindu dead, he grew suddenly ill. He returned to Boston with a swollen brain that destroyed the vision in his left eye. Scans showed his condition was worsening. The unwelcome news placed him on a seesaw between anxiety and acceptance. ‘I was really thrown when an MRI wasn’t posted, and the doctors didn’t respond to my calls,’ he said. ‘I can still get irritable with people.’ But he just as quickly grasped that the agitation stemmed from the ‘delusional idea that I’m in charge of all of this’.
Living in a rented home in the Boston suburb of Brookline, close to his medical team, Schwartzberg agreed in the summer to their recommendation that he undergo chemotherapy, surprising himself by his intense desire to remain alive. He also agreed to set aside many precious mid-afternoon hours – when his fading energy was generally at its peak – to discuss his life and lessons with me.
‘There is no escape,’ he told me, sitting on the porch one August afternoon. His frame, always thin, bordered on gaunt, and his head was newly shaved for the chemotherapy he had recently begun. ‘We live as if our own dying is the only thing that is not true. Yet it is true. I don’t have endless time.’
One concern was that he would lose his capacity to speak or think. ‘Who is not attached to their thinking? It’s not like I don’t get gripped by the fear of dying. There can be a little bit of panic about whether there will be pain. But it is all going to end.’ We all are coming and going, he explained.
Dying, too, is a spiritual and existential coming-of-age. ‘Wow, my consciousness gonads are dropping!’
He’d discovered that he could hold the truth of his mortality in a non-morbid way, quoting Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise (2015), who said that dying is not scary – what’s scary is dying in a death-phobic culture. ‘The fact that I get to do it this way is cool,’ he added, acknowledging the circle of friends making it possible to experience a more conscious dying process. ‘I’m learning a lot, and it’s very moving for me to share it with others.’
The process, to Schwartzberg, harked back to his teenage years and the struggles of puberty, lying latent for the conditions to set it off. Dying, too, is a spiritual and existential coming-of-age. ‘Wow, my consciousness gonads are dropping!’ he wrote on his Caring Bridge page in June. This second puberty came with irritability and sadness but, mostly, he felt joy. ‘I never thought that would be part of my orbiting closer to death.’
What comes next? ‘Death may be magnificent beyond comprehension; the gateway might be a beautiful human experience, but nobody has come back.’ As he neared the end, he wanted to be reminded by others that he was dying. ‘I wonder if I will struggle to breathe, or forget everything I’ve learned.’
This was quintessential Schwartzberg; painfully aware that all his hard-won knowledge might be swept away in a moment, yet refusing to entertain regret. In his final months, he only intensified his efforts to impart what he could before death silenced his increasingly hoarse voice.
On 8 December – celebrated by Buddhists as the day the Buddha was enlightened – Schwartzberg began one final meditation at his home, slipping gently into a morphine-induced sleep. Two days later, he drew his last breath. A small group of friends tenderly washed the body and dressed it in the white linen suit. The shrouded corpse was laid to rest in a cemetery on Cape Cod, a dozen miles from Captain Jack’s Wharf.
Near the end of his boundary-breaking life, Schwartzberg offered one compelling lesson: that ‘there is something other than me, from which the self emerges and is intertwined.’ He came to trust this nameless something to provide solid ground – and a measure of joy – amid the passing bouts of disorientation and fear. Sitting on his porch in August, he pauses, squinting through the tree branches shading him from the fierce end-of-summer sun.
‘I can’t tell anybody else how to do it,’ he said finally, ‘but I can say this is possible.’
Andrew Lawler is a journalist, author, and a former facilitator with the Body Electric School. He lives in North Carolina.
Edited by Pam Weintraub
Editor’s note: in the final months of his life, Steve Schwartzberg welcomed the writer Andrew Lawler into a series of intimate conversations that shaped this portrait. Known for his workshops that fearlessly explored the erotic, meditation, and the dying process, Schwartzberg set aside many recent afternoon hours to reflect on his path, his teachings, and his conscious embrace of what he called ‘the transition’ – culminating in his death on 10 December 2025.
The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind
Finding Peter Putnam
The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind
By Amanda Gefter
The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.
It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.
A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.
Then silence.
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
How could this genius just vanish into obscurity?
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”
That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.
The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.
Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:
Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness
Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality
Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.
Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.”
A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”
The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?
I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.
The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.
Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.”
Fuller led me to Barry Spinello, a filmmaker in Bakersfield, California, who met Putnam at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1963. Cannonball Adderley was wailing on the sax. “I turned around and saw this guy doing a ridiculous dance,” Spinello said—half jive, half seizure. Putnam was tall and thin like an overgrown twig, flailing like he might tie himself into a knot. They got to talking, and Spinello found Putnam so fascinating that, 10 years later, he traveled to Louisiana to record a week’s worth of conversations about his work.
For nights on end, on a cot in Spinello’s studio, I slept to the clicks and hums of an achy reel-to-reel machine, as it fed 35 hours of audio into my digital recorder. I listened to one of the recordings in my headphones on the plane ride back, flinching when Putnam’s voice broke through the static. Suddenly he became a real person, a person with vocal cords. He sounded like Jimmy Stewart with a stutter. “Sometimes I think it would’ve worked with Wheeler,” he was saying, “but it just …” Then he went silent.
Spinello gave me an email address for Coleman Clarke, who had met Putnam in New York City in the 1960s while Clarke was doing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. “It’s mind blowing to me that you found Putnam in Wheeler’s journals,” Clarke wrote in reply, as if I’d won a scavenger hunt that everyone else had quit playing decades ago.
Clarke seemed relieved that someone had finally come around asking about Putnam, eager to tell me about this extraordinary man who had slipped through the cracks of history. “He was a genius,” Clarke said. “Every talk with him had this level of significance that was just orders of magnitude higher up than a normal conversation with a normal human being.”
One person led to another. Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers.
“Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”
Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”
Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.
How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.
“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.”
In a January freeze in 2013, I headed to Rochester, New York, to meet Clarke. He was in his late 70s but looked younger—tall and slim with gray hair and a bounce in his step. “I’m just so excited that you’ve found Putnam,” he said warmly. It sounded like, what took you so long? He told me he had some of Putnam’s papers in storage.
We drove to a nondescript brick building. I followed him down a cold, white hallway until he stopped in front of one of the units. He turned the key and lifted the massive door.
You have to understand what I was expecting. I thought we were going to his storage unit, that it would be filled with whatever storage units are filled with—old clothes and rusty bikes, mismatched chairs and unused exercise equipment. Then somewhere, beneath a pile of something, in a dusty cardboard box, a few of Putnam’s papers.
That’s not what this was.
As the door rolled up, I caught a glimpse of what lay behind.
“This is all Putnam?” I whispered.
Clarke nodded. “I’ve never shown anyone before you.”
Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn.
There were no old clothes. No mismatched chairs. Only filing cabinets. Rows of filing cabinets, all neatly labeled, giving the whole place the appearance of a professional archive. I looked around, stunned. It was the entire library of Putnam’s unpublished writings. His theory, his life. The whole long-lost thing.
When Clarke first heard that Putnam had been killed, he made frantic phone calls to the Putnam family lawyer to find out what was happening with Peter’s papers. The answer seemed to be nothing—they’d been moved from Houma to a Cleveland warehouse and might have been thrown away. Clarke rushed to Ohio, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to his home in Utah for safe keeping; when he moved to Rochester, the archive moved with him.
Now he dug through drawers, handing me papers and folders until I was holding a stack so large I nearly toppled over. Typed manuscripts at hundreds of pages apiece; binders full of notes and letters; handwritten journals; accordion folders bursting with photos, telegrams, and postcards—we piled as much as we could into the trunk of my rental car and I drove back to my hotel.
It’s one thing to read through curated papers at a place like the American Philosophical Society, with pages gingerly propped on foam wedges under the watchful eyes of librarians. It’s another to flop down on a white bedspread in a Courtyard Marriott and hold a man’s unprocessed life, alone. You turn it over in your hands, still covered in his pencil marks, smudged with his fingerprints; an envelope singed in the spiral shape of his stove ring, yellowed glue clutching his pet bird’s tattered feather, a letter torn apart seemingly in anger and taped back together in remorse. Suddenly you’re implicated. You’ve disturbed a sleeping thing.
Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about.
There was no way I could read it all in a reasonable amount of time, so I spent the next week driving between my hotel and the storage unit. I’d stay up all night, photographing the items page by page, then head back to the storage unit, bleary-eyed in the daylight, to swap it all out for a new batch. I’d already photographed some 10,000 pages of material when Clarke grinned and confessed, “There’s a second storage unit.”
Back in my apartment in Cambridge, I began sorting through everything I’d found. Photographs, letters, transcripts, papers—I spread them on the kitchen table like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. Gradually, Putnam’s life and the scope of his theory came into view.
He developed it over the course of three decades, starting as a teenager in the 1940s. He wrote constantly—in the Navy, when he was sent to the brig for reading poetry on duty; while earning his degrees at Princeton University, and after, teaching physics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the 1950s and Columbia University in New York in the 1960s. He wrote while he was living in Fuller’s office at Barnard College with little more than a cot, a phonograph, and a hot plate, and when he moved into a basement apartment in upper Manhattan, just west of Harlem, his lanky form hunched over a typewriter between the grated window bars.
Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.”
I took the incomprehensibility as a test. I didn’t know why I was being tested. I only knew I wanted to pass. I was driven in part by the looks on everyone’s faces, a pain that appeared fresh despite the years. “My basic upset is, I feel somehow I failed to get his stuff out there,” Fuller said. Wheeler had felt the same. “I realize I didn’t do my duty by Peter,” he said after Putnam died.
Their regret was now my inheritance, a whisper that grew louder as the years pressed on. I might have walked away if I hadn’t been struck with the same feeling that had taken hold of everyone else: that Putnam was actually onto something. That he was quite possibly a genius. In the beginning, I was chasing Peter Putnam the fantasy, a forgotten janitor who’d discovered the structure of the mind. But the deeper I read, I found myself thinking, Wait, did a forgotten janitor seriously discover the structure of the mind?
Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”
The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.
This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.
When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.
That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.
At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.
Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.
A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.
Whenever Putnam made a new friend, his mother warned him, “They’re probably using you for your money.”
Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.
Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.
That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”
So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.
Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.
In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.
As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.
When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.
But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.
How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.
“Perhaps I have actually found a place in the world that wants me at last—as I am.”
In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”
New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.
In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”
Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.
Putnam grew up with money. He was born in 1927 in Ohio, to John B. Putnam, Sr., charming corporate lawyer, and Mildred Andrews Putnam, fearsome lady-who-lunched. They lived in the village of Bratenahl, a tiny neighborhood outside Cleveland, home to the ultra-rich, in a big, white Victorian house with a round cone-topped turret and the expanse of Lake Erie unfurling from their backyard. Whenever Putnam made a new friend, his mother warned him, “They’re probably using you for your money.”
When Putnam and his older brother, Johnny, were little, their parents told them a story about a boy named Ikey. Ikey’s father had lifted Ikey up and sat him high up on the mantle above the fireplace. Then the father told him, “OK, Ikey. Jump!”
“He is afraid,” Putnam wrote, “but told his daddy will catch him. He is afraid, but told to have faith, and all will go well.” So Ikey jumps. But his father doesn’t catch him. He steps to the side, lets the kid fall. “When Ikey cries and complains,” Putnam wrote, “he is told never to trust anyone, not even his mother and father.”
That was the moral of the story that Mildred and John Putnam told to their children. Never trust anyone. Not even us. Johnny cried, but Peter just soaked it in.
At 16, Putnam joined the Navy, and it was there, in radar school, that he realized his aptitude for physics. At the same time, he realized his desperation to unravel the mystery of minds. He needed to understand the secret motives his mother warned about, especially now that he was coming to grips with his homosexuality, which left him feeling helplessly set apart.
In 1944, Putnam received word that his brother, a fighter pilot in the Air Force, had been killed overseas. Peter’s diary entry that day read: “Tuesday—Johnny isn’t.” Johnny had been the Putnam’s golden boy: blond-haired, blue-eyed, confident, athletic. Now there was just Peter: bookish, skinny, painfully shy. The taller of the two, he cultivated a slouch, as if embarrassed by his continued existence. Two years later, still reeling from Johnny’s death, he used his Navy credits to enroll as a physics major at Princeton.
Wheeler took him under his wing, bringing him to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, raving to Bohr about Putnam’s “very great interest in the philosophical aspects of physics.”
After graduation from Princeton, Putnam reluctantly enrolled in Yale Law School. Now that he was the only son, he was expected to become a lawyer like his father and grandfather. Two years later, his father was diagnosed with late-stage leukemia. As he was dying, he told Peter to forget law and use his inheritance to return to his real work. So Peter joined the philosophy department at Harvard University, planning to do a Ph.D. on Eddington. But when his father died in 1951, Mildred, wanting to retain control over the only family she had left, withheld the money. Peter’s decisions would go through her. Peter, determined to make his own money, dropped out of school and took a job at Sanders and Associates, an electronics company in New Hampshire.
From his salary alone, he saved up enough money to quit and return to Princeton to study with Wheeler for his Ph.D. He promptly informed Mildred that he would not accept another dime from her, ever. “I shall not need, and will not accept, any more money from you from here on,” he wrote in a letter.
Cut off from the family money, real friendships suddenly seemed possible. “What a funny delightful sensation it is to be asking for the cheapest rooms, and trying to save money,” he wrote in his diary in 1957. “It makes me smile and smile—as though I had a secret. I can feel the friends I have getting wind of it, and speculating—and the nicest part—is that it makes me feel one of them.” He signed the entry, “Self-righteous Peter.”
One of those friends was Fuller. They were walking across campus when Fuller casually asked what Putnam was working on. Putnam turned to him and asked, “Do you really want to know?”
He’d never told anyone about his theory, but with money no longer blocking the way, it all came spilling out. “We talked and talked till I was bleary-eyed and dead tired and had to quit,” Fuller said.
He built walls around his work, walls made of words, but he built them too high—they kept everyone out.
Putnam dressed in shabby clothes. He sold the Cadillac convertible Mildred had bought him, used the money to buy a bicycle, and gave the remainder of the proceeds to Princeton. He also gave them all the stock he’d earned at Sanders—some 600 shares, valued around $9,000, which he’d asked for in lieu of raises—on the condition that they wouldn’t sell them until he gave the green light. He did, a decade later, and they sold for more than $1 million.
Putnam asked that the donations be used to buy great works of modern sculpture to be displayed around campus. Clarke told me Putnam’s love of abstract sculpture came from “his thinking about the brain and the centrality of motor pathways”—the sculptural form resolving an artist’s own contradictions, then inviting the viewer to move, to think, in new ways. The collection was to be a memorial to his brother. The donor was to be listed as “Anonymous.”
After a stint teaching physics in Amherst, Putnam followed Fuller to New York City in 1963. Fuller was teaching at Columbia, so Putnam taught a summer seminar in the physics department. His lectures were so heavily laced with philosophy that students from the Union Theological Seminary across the street began showing up. After class they’d go to a nearby café, quoting lines of Putnamese. “Jazz is the mathematization of the soul.” “We know things in the act, not in their essence.” The Seminary hired Putnam, and set him up in the basement apartment on Claremont Ave.
In the day, Putnam taught and wrote; at night he’d walk uptown to Harlem to dance at the jazz clubs, a neural free-for-all to enact his improvisational mind. Most of the time, he was the only white guy there. One night he met a Black ex-Army Major named John DeBrew, who went by the nickname Claude. “Claude sneaked under my defenses as a bird or flower does,” Putnam wrote. “I’ve been most lucky in finding a gentle, affectionate person.” He was open about the relationship with everyone, noting in a letter to Fuller that, when it came to his sexuality, “We should be able to discuss anything, and treat it as we should a problem in mathematics.”
One of Putnam’s students, Kim Hopper, now a medical anthropologist at Columbia, told me that Putnam wrote an article for the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, where he mentioned, in an offhanded way, the “depth and sensitivity of the homosexual community, in which I have been privileged to participate.” “This was at a time when nobody came out,” Hopper said, “especially not in a theological journal!”
“Perhaps I have actually found a place in the world that wants me at last—as I am,” Putnam wrote to his mother. “In any case I am very pleased.”
Mildred was less pleased. She offered Claude $35,000 to leave Peter. Claude didn’t take the bribe, a move that endeared him to Peter for the rest of their lives. Still, Mildred sent a note to Peter, scribbling: “Remember Ikey.”
In Body Image
Back in Princeton, Wheeler was coming around to the idea that the observer might be implicated in quantum mechanics, and he knew his best bet for understanding the observer was Putnam. He was hoping that Putnam would return to Princeton so they could work together, uniting a theory of the observer with a theory of the observed. Putnam wanted nothing more. “So many people dream of convincing father images of the value of their work,” he replied.
When Mildred realized what was happening, she jumped in, trying to ensure that Peter would get the job and that he’d owe it all to her. She began dangling donations, offering to build a new physics building at Princeton with Wheeler’s name on it. Wheeler wanted no part of it, but Mildred was a force of nature, a hurricane in pearls. “Hopefully something constructive could be arranged over luncheon,” she wrote to Wheeler, adding that she wanted to keep the arrangement between themselves. “Will you please forget I ever wrote this letter and throw it into the fire, as Peter would never forgive me.”
Putnam pleaded with her to stay out of his relationship with Wheeler, but she continued to allude to secret meetings and quid pro quo donations until he didn’t know who or what to believe.
Unable to trust that Wheeler’s interest was pure, Putnam refused to consider a position at Princeton, or a fellowship at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. He stuck with teaching at the Seminary.
It’s clear from Wheeler’s journals his interest in Putnam’s work was genuine and deep. Over and over, he read the few papers that Putnam gave him, writing out notes and questions line by line. “He would throw up his hands in despair,” Wheeler’s daughter, Alison Lahnston, told me, “but he kept at it.”
One morning in 1974, over breakfast in Manhattan, Wheeler took 12 pages of notes as Putnam talked about his work, then submitted a book proposal to W.H. Freeman & Company on Putnam’s behalf. The publishers bit, and were ready to draw up a contract, but Putnam again worried that his mother was behind the offer, and refused to sign.
Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. From Reality to Consciousness. From Consciousness to Reality.
As the meeting approached, Putnam grew nervous. He demanded to know whether Mildred had been involved behind the scenes. Wheeler assured him that she wasn’t, that the talks were solely his idea. Together, they boarded a plane to Boston.
I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT. Here, finally, was Putnam’s chance to explain his ideas to the top neuroscientists of the time. I pressed the headphones tight against my ears.
Wheeler had just finished speaking about the observer in quantum mechanics and introduced Putnam with a warning. “Some terms Peter uses, one needs a glossary to translate.” Wheeler placed a transparency on the projector—he’d made an actual glossary of Putnam’s terms. The crowd burst into laughter. I didn’t have to see Putnam’s face to feel it growing hot. When he began to speak, he stuttered.
“You only perceive signals that are useful for shaping behavior … A game is a special kind of mathematics … But for a game you need a goal function … We’re suggesting that the category repetition is a candidate … You’re searching for rules of choice that allow a repeating or self-reproducing path … There’s a transcendental core to the laws of physics themselves …”
The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.
Things went from bad to worse. Back in New York, Putnam learned he’d lost his job at Union. The President cited “budgetary concerns,” which Putnam took as a veiled attempt to ask for a donation, suspecting that his mother had suggested as much to the administration behind his back.
Wheeler made one last ditch effort to convince Putnam not to give up on academia. I found a handwritten note he wrote in 1975. Not a note, exactly—more like an affidavit.
“I find it utterly impossible to believe that your mother directly or indirectly made any contributions to, or in any way influenced, the action of the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT Neurophysiology, [or] Freeman and Company … I have never been and do not intend to be a party to any arrangement in which relations between you and me, or between you and any institutional setting in which I have any say or knowledge, are dependent in any way whatsoever on any contribution, or any expectation of any contribution, from your mother. There is no lawyer-like or other reservations or loophole in the intent and content of this freely given assurance.”
But even Wheeler couldn’t penetrate Putnam’s defenses. Never trust anyone. It was a rule of behavior that had dug a trench in his neural circuitry, formed a universal, self-reinforcing loop, and no matter how many alternatives competed with it in parallel, it was always strengthened. It always won. He couldn’t risk having people take a cursory interest in his work just to flatter him, to court him for his money. To weed out anyone who wasn’t in it for the right reasons, he refused to provide an easy summary. It was total commitment or nothing at all. So he built walls around his work, walls made of words, but he built them too high—they kept everyone out, and kept Putnam in.
In June 1975, Putnam sat down and wrote a letter to Wheeler:
“It should be obvious that what I’m doing is a lot of nonsense. I didn’t convince any of the big boys at the conference—didn’t even get any excited about any of the points or themes … Clearly all I’ve been doing is hoodwinking a few naive though often top students—after ten years of teaching my crazy course … finally, the right thing has been done.”
Putnam placed his books on a table at Union Seminary for the taking, dumped stacks of manuscripts in the trash, gave his records and turntable to a janitor. Then he opened to a fresh page in his journal and scrawled, “For myself, given my weaknesses, this is the end. I can’t try any more … At least I’ve finished things off. It fits well enough—for a start for someone else … The best I can do—like Rimbaud—is to vanish.”
In Body Image
An oil town built on the swamplands between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, Houma, Louisiana, is about an hour’s drive southwest from New Orleans. In 1975, Putnam had signed himself and Claude up for VISTA—Volunteers in Service to America, the domestic branch of the Peace Corps—and VISTA sent them to Houma. They were promised government housing, but when the building manager saw that Claude was Black, their apartment suddenly became unavailable. They tried another housing project. Same story. Finally, they went to Senator Circle, the Black project on the other side of town, but they weren’t welcome there either. Interracial and gay—there was no housing project for that. So Putnam found them a spot in a trailer park. The landlady said she’d pray for them.
They reported for VISTA duties at the Wayout Clinic, a nonprofit serving the Black community in Terrebonne Parish. The city had scraped together funds to open a new rec center and they’d asked Wayout to run it. Putnam asked the program director why they couldn’t just give the money directly to the Black community and let them run their own rec center instead of having a bunch of white people in charge. The director told Putnam that it was impossible, that there were legal complexities he wouldn’t understand; it would have to go through a nonprofit, it was very complicated. Putnam didn’t mention that he was a physicist or that he’d studied at Yale Law. He just turned around and registered a new nonprofit, the Terrebonne Improvement Association (TIA). He put together an all-Black Board of Directors, then applied for VISTA volunteers of their own.
The TIA published their own community newsletter, featuring pieces by local Black writers alongside transcripts of speeches by national civil rights leaders. Claude delivered speeches to the TIA, co-written with Putnam behind the scenes. Putnam thought it was important that the community know all the legal tricks the white CEOs and politicians used to keep them down, so Claude spoke about reapportionment and gerrymandering; he urged them to vote in local elections, to make their voices heard on school boards and in town halls. The TIA got two Black representatives elected to the Police Jury. They made plans to fight for better services in minority neighborhoods, for their cut of revenue sharing, for affirmative action all the way up the ladder.
Putnam continued to keep his wealth a secret. Mildred had released the inheritance from his father to him in 1972. Putnam put all the money into a charitable trust and named it the Mildred Andrews Fund so that it wouldn’t bear his name. He again stipulated the money should be used to fund public sculpture, this time in New York City and Cleveland, Ohio. The artworks, he wrote, “shall be so placed as to benefit especially our underprivileged (ghetto) areas and so chosen as to express their life and outlook.” By the mid ’80s, Putnam, through stock investments, had grown the fund to $40 million. “Peter was the most skilled master of finance” he’d ever known, commented the family lawyer. Putnam never touched a penny for himself.
To make ends meet, he took odd jobs repairing radios and shucking oysters. He bought a place where Claude and he could live permanently—a small, one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen and wood paneling on the walls. It was on the main road, next to a vacant lot, but the back door opened out onto the bayou, where they could sit and watch the shrimp boats go by and the moonlight ripple on slow, dark water. “Life is a simple thing,” Claude told Peter. “I want to live my life so people associated with me are happy.”
Eventually Putnam landed a gig as a night watchman and janitor for the Department of Transportation. “It’s clearly the best job I’ve ever had,” he told Spinello on the recordings. “I needed to get other kinds of roots in the community. I think that this position is in some sense symbolically right. Whereas my position as a teacher, you know, symbolically stunk.”
The emotion welled up in his voice. “I mean, how could I get in direct relationship to people?” he stuttered. “When there’s a big hunk of money … Even my own prof, who I loved, who I did my thesis under … My mother denied it was going on. She would talk dramatically about committing suicide unless I believed her. I said, ‘I believe you.’ But, you know, how can I protect myself through a thing like that?”
The check from the janitor was the largest single gift the environmental group had ever received.
His voice grew calmer, sadder. “I did kick Wheeler pretty hard in the face for that. I think I was wrong in doing that. The issue is someplace else. I should have been down here sweeping floors.”
Putnam knew his mother had destroyed his relationship with Wheeler and had prevented him from getting his work out into the world, but he never blamed her. He believed that her tactics, however much they hurt him, were the rules of behavior she needed to survive in a world dominated by men.
“It is especially hard for any woman to be herself,” he once wrote her, “and believe in herself as she is, surrounded as she is with these ridiculous man-made images of how she is supposed to feel and act.”
It’s easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right. And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.
“My life’s work, if there is a one-sentence formula for it, is trying to find some path of reconciliation with you,” Putnam wrote her.
Mildred got sick in 1981, and she moved in with her son and Claude. She could have lived anywhere, a mansion in New Orleans, with a staff, like she had back in Ohio, a chef, a housekeeper, nurses. Instead, Putnam gave her the bedroom, and he and Claude slept on the pullout couch. They made for a strange family, content in the knowledge that they were all there for the right reasons. Putnam and Claude took care of Mildred for three years, until she died in 1984.
Wheeler continued trying to convince Putnam to publish his work. He drove from Princeton to Houma to visit—noting afterward that Putnam was “living as poor as Job’s turkey.” In 1986, Wheeler wrote to Putnam, ending the letter: “There is so much more I’d like to say, but let me sum it all up in one word, gratitude: gratitude to you for all you’ve meant and done over all these years, gratitude to heaven above that you’re still on this earth, still capable—God willing, and in God’s good time—to publish something great.”
December 7, 1987. Putnam swung his leg over his bicycle, like he’d done so many times before.
The drunken swerve.
The screech.
The silence.
On a fall afternoon in 2024, I wandered the Princeton campus among the towering sculptures. There was Tony Smith’s abstract Moses, Alexander Calder’s Five Disks: One Empty, Antoine Pevsner’s Construction in the Third and Fourth Dimension, and Jacques Lipchitz’s Song of the Vowels. This was the trail of breadcrumbs Putnam left behind.
I watched as other people—students and professors—strolled right past them, as if the sculptures were invisible. Which was weird, because they’re huge. Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment X looms 21 feet tall, a steel screen with geometric forms in cut-out compartments that reminded me of a library, or a secret language, or both. Picasso’s Head of a Woman, with her stark, cubist angles, weighs in at 20,000 pounds, her rosy cheeks rendered in red quartzite, swirling eyes in black granite.
The Princeton sculptures aren’t Putnam’s only breadcrumbs.
Along Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River is Gene Kangas’ Hart Crane Memorial Sculpture, commissioned by Putnam to memorialize the poet, who, after being assaulted onboard a steamship for being gay, jumped overboard and drowned. At Howard University, there’s A Bridge Above and Beyond by Richard Hunt, symbolizing the connection between Africa and her children in America, dedicated to “Black womanhood” and “single mothers everywhere.”
In New York City’s West Village, in a sliver of greenery known as Christopher Park, across from the Stonewall Inn, where 1969 riots sparked the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States, is a sculpture of four figures by George Segal. Two men, standing, appear deep in conversation, one’s arm wrapped around the other’s shoulder; two women sit side by side on a bench, one’s hand on the other’s knee. When Putnam commissioned the piece, he stipulated that the work “had to be loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people … and it had to have equal representation of men and women.” When it was installed, the media called it the “first monument to homosexuals in the United States.”
In the center of the Princeton campus, I came upon Oval with Points by Henry Moore, a massive womblike, hollowed-out thing, its bronze now patinated sea-foam green, with two points reaching in toward the center, almost meeting, but not quite. I sat down in the oval and thought about how many things—people, ideas—hide in plain sight, and how many answers to scientific mysteries might be stashed away, junked, or forgotten.
I thought of Wheeler, who helped pick out this sculpture—he described it as a “place for two friends to sit side by side”—and of his lifelong fear that Putnam’s work would be lost.
It’s impossible to know what might have happened if Putnam had gotten his ideas out when he was alive. When he first worked out his theory, Turing was here in Princeton visiting John von Neumann as he was building a stored-program electronic computer, which the press referred to as an “electronic brain.” The comparison between brains and Turing machines was immediately embraced by the scientific community and so entrenched during Putnam’s lifetime that his suggestion that the brain is a “computer of a fundamentally different genus” simply couldn’t compute.
The reason an induction machine—a mind—can do more than a universal Turing machine is because it’s always reaching out into the world. Which was exactly what Putnam himself struggled to do.
Putnam turned his writings into a self-contained room where Ikey could hide and no one would find him. The only one who managed to crack open the door was Claude. “He teaches me how to live outside words,” Putnam wrote. Claude lived in their Houma apartment until he died in 2008.
In Ohio’s Morgan Swamp on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie, among beaver ponds and vernal pools, nestled in a forest of yellow birch and hemlock, are tundra swans and four-toed salamanders, white calla lilies and river otters. In the Animas Mountain range in New Mexico, wild turkeys and long-nosed bats, white-sided jackrabbits and spotted owls, live and breed in 500 square miles of unadulterated ecosystem. On the sandbars and shallows of Nebraska’s Platte River, sandhill cranes swoop down on the floodplain to roost and forage en route to the Arctic. Some stop in the Ohio wetlands on their return, where they dance in the shadows of soaring bald eagles headed to nest in Putnam Marsh.
All of these lands still exist thanks, in large part, to Putnam. His will stipulated that upon his death, his money—all $40 million of it—be given to the Nature Conservancy. When the check from the janitor showed up, it was the largest single gift the environmental group had ever received. Putnam would have been happy to remain anonymous. Only the marsh—which he requested be named for his parents—gives him away.
Today, science is beginning to catch up to Putnam. His ideas about the plasticity of the brain and the importance of neural conditioning have become mainstream. Many cognitive scientists are pursuing a theory known as “embodied mind” that emphasizes the central role of motor behavior in cognition and perception, so central to Putnam’s own theory.
At the same time, as Fuller put it, “there’s stuff in Putnam that no one has thought of yet. There’s precious new material for scientists who are on the cutting edge.” That includes not only those working in cognitive science, but also in artificial intelligence and robotics. AI researchers are eagerly searching for models of general intelligence, wondering how it is that humans learn, or have common sense, or deal with novel situations. How humans, as Putnam explained, can perform induction.
I’d spent more than a decade hunched over inscrutable pages under the weight of so much regret about how Putnam’s story had ended. Now, sitting up in the soft curve of Moore’s sculpture, I traced my fingers along the surface where so many fingers had traced it before; in that one spot, the patina was rubbed clean, and the original bronze shone through. Sunlight glistened off the metal, and it dawned on me that maybe Putnam’s work hadn’t been lost. Maybe it was just waiting for its moment.
Amanda Gefter is a science writer and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn.
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