Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and to him.

The reality, after our son was born, was quite different. In those sleep-deprived early days, I found myself resorting to my phone as a refuge from the chaos. I fell into some embarrassing middle-aged-dad stereotypes. I developed a bizarre interest in forums about personal finance and vintage hats. I spent up to four hours a day looking at my phone while right in front of me was this new, beautiful life, a baby we had dreamed about for years.

My wife, Cristina, felt abandoned in the isolation of new motherhood and complained of my near-constant phone use.

“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”

When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to break a phone addiction]

Such easy and constant access to distraction is having an impact: Overuse harms our sleep and mental health. Constant distraction makes us less productive and can impair our ability to concentrate. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce our cognitive ability by taking attention away from other tasks—even if the phone is turned off. A majority of married couples report that their partner’s divided attention has caused strife in their relationship.

On a warm Saturday afternoon this past spring, I reached a breaking point. I had been on my phone for hours a day for the past several weeks. I found myself reaching for the phone whenever there was an opportunity or brief pause in parenting responsibilities. Was this what life was going to be like for the next 30 years? Days filled with a series of small interruptions while I scrolled for scraps of trivia and news?

While our child napped that afternoon, I sat brooding on the porch. I told Cristina that I wasn’t happy with the way we were living and that I didn’t know what to do to get back on track.

“It sounds like we should get rid of the internet,” she told me.

I knew she was right. For years, we had discussed raising our child in a tech-lite home, but we had become so overwhelmed with parenting that this priority had been pushed aside. We had tried half measures before: setting a timer on the Wi-Fi router that shut it off during evening hours, making “no phone” zones in the house. But these were too easy to get around. To achieve what we truly wanted—a home that served as a sanctuary for meaningful family time without distractions—this was the step we needed to take. We talked about how spaces that were once off-limits for technology seemed to dwindle by the day. Our National Parks, public restrooms, even places of worship are now game for digital connection. We felt it was important to have at least one space in our lives that would be set apart. We agreed that our home, the one place where we still had control, would be a fine option.

“When?” I asked.

“Now,” she said.

As Millennials born in the mid-1980s, my wife and I are part of the last generation to have known life before the introduction of widespread home-internet access. We straddle both sides of the digital revolution. We remember answering the telephone without knowing who was calling, showing up at a friend’s house unannounced, what it was like to be lost and bored. In my 20s, I traveled across Europe, Latin America, and Asia for months without a phone, relying only on guidebooks and advice from strangers. I hitchhiked across the American South with a flip phone. I did a stint on a commercial fishing crew in Alaska, which put me completely off the grid for five months without access to a phone or the internet.

Cristina and I had also gone off the grid together earlier in our marriage. In 2018, we moved into a 72-square-foot tiny house we built into a cargo van, where we lived for two years, mostly on public lands and without Wi-Fi. In the wilderness, cellular data were limited, so we logged on only for essentials when we popped back into civilization. It was on the fringes where we first tasted the joy of a life in which the internet was merely a tool.

Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together. Life was broken down to its most basic elements: Find a place to sleep; cook simple meals to eat; bathe in a river; explore. We promised ourselves that when our time in the van came to an end, we would continue living this way as best we could. (We didn’t, of course; the pandemic started not long after our return to civilization, making the internet feel essential for work and social interaction.)

So yes, we’d had some practice with this before. Surely we could make it work.

But we did need to plan. We live in a log cabin beyond the reach of cell towers in North Carolina’s rural High Country, and up until that point we had relied on Wi-Fi to make phone calls. We might be crazy enough to cut our home off from the internet, but we didn’t want to be completely disconnected. We were trying to relive the ’90s, sure, but not the 1890s. Opting out of the internet would require us to opt in to a landline, which raised even more questions: If we needed to call a doctor, how would we find the phone number? What if we needed an emergency plumber? Turns out, the Yellow Pages still exist. (They’re actually called The Real Yellow Pages, as though dozens of imposter phone books are out there.)

[Read: America gave up on the best home technology there is]

When the technician from the phone company arrived to put in our landline, I asked him, “Do you install many landlines these days?”

“Mostly just for old people,” he said.

I told him we were doing it in hopes of making our lives simpler. He just nodded as if to say, Sure, man, whatever.

With a couple of twists of his tools, the room filled with a sound I hadn’t heard in ages: a dial tone. That long-forgotten but familiar pitch instantly brought me back to childhood: the anticipation of calling my best friend to ask if he wanted to come outside and play hockey in the street, or the nervous dread in middle school of calling a girl for the first time.

“You know,” the technician said before walking out the door, “most people just use Wi-Fi calling.”

I spent our final morning with internet service on a content binge. I scrolled Twitter. Using a family member’s borrowed password, I pulled up one final movie on Netflix: This Is the End. Halfway through the first act, Seth Rogen and James Franco suddenly froze on the screen. The house went quiet. We were officially disconnected.

Like any form of withdrawal, the first days offline required adjustment. With nowhere to scroll, I developed a voracious appetite for words. I had downloaded digital versions of magazines to an iPad and loaded my nightstand with books from the library. I devoured them all, and started reading anything I could get my hands on.

Over time, the racing pace of a mind that had been hooked on content slowed down. I began to read deeply, sometimes for hours, consuming complex works that I would have struggled to focus on before.

While reading news articles, I still felt an old tug to share links through social media. But now there was no one to share them with. I was reading purely for reading’s sake, sharing an intimate moment with no one but the author. It made reading and thinking a private act, without any temptation to be performative in sharing my opinions. Reading through entire publications, instead of finding stories through a social-media algorithm that fed me a narrow range of content it thought I would enjoy, exposed me to a broader range of opinions, viewpoints, and types of stories. It made me a better consumer of news.

At the end of the first week, my phone reported that my screen time had plummeted by 80 percent. I had reclaimed several hours a day, time that I used to play games with my son, cook elaborate meals, engage in uninterrupted work, and take long walks with my family. Sometimes I just sat and thought, a radical act in our hustle culture. I daydreamed, letting my mind travel where it pleased with no agenda or direction. I realized that it had been years since I’d last allowed myself to do, well, nothing.

Friends and family have responded with bewilderment and concerned amusement. “I could never do that,” people often tell us, “but I wish I could.” One friend—a former chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress—tried to sign me up for a print subscription to Hustler magazine. (This unsolicited gesture of concern for my sexual well-being failed because of a new anti-porn law in his state. And thank heavens for that: We rent our home from a Bible scholar and minister.) Other friends, knowing that our landline doesn’t have caller ID, occasionally prank call us like we did when we were teenagers. (We welcome it; the calls lead to long, meaningful opportunities to catch up after years of texting.) When we aren’t home, callers seem amused to leave a real voice message on our answering machine. It’s fun to listen to younger people leave messages; they are adorably befuddled by what to say. When a friend in her 20s tried to call and got a busy signal, she figured the phone was broken: She’d never heard that sound before.

Of course, this has also come with trade-offs.

One night, while watching a DVD in our basement, Cristina and I saw a dark object flash across the screen. Did a bird get into the house? I stood up to turn on a light and saw another flying object with wide black wings silently swoop past my head.

“It’s a bat!” Cristina yelled. She leaped off the couch onto the ground and threw me a blanket. “Cover your head!”

As our eyes adjusted to the light, we watched several bats stream out of our fireplace, flying in circles around our heads. On our bellies, we crawled up the stairs and fled into our bedroom, shutting the door behind us. In normal times, we would have pulled out our phones and started frantically searching for what to do when your house is infested with bats. But we didn’t have that option. It was nearly midnight, too late to phone a friend, so we just had to pray that the bats hadn’t made it into our bedroom. We covered the baby’s crib with a mosquito net and tried to go to sleep.

The next morning, Cristina called her mother and asked her to search for information while I plunged into the phone book for the number of an exterminator. Over the phone, Cristina’s mother read us information about how to handle bats and whether we’d need a rabies shot. She described in detail how to identify bat poop. My mother-in-law was literally reading us the internet. It felt ridiculous.

Beyond battling bats in our basement, not having access to the internet also makes working from home a unique challenge. As a journalist, being virtually unreachable has done wonders for my ability to write for long stretches without distraction. But I have to leave the house in search of Wi-Fi to finish some tasks, such as responding to emails from editors, participating in group calls on Zoom, or performing other collaborative work that can only be done online. I spend hours during the workday holed up in my office or the local library, time that otherwise could be spent with a laptop on my couch. When coordinating work calls, I have to give out two phone numbers, depending on whether I’m home or not. I sometimes have to hop in the car before bed and drive down the mountain to check a last-minute email. My job as a university lecturer requires me to be present in the classroom, so I aim to accomplish as much work as possible on campus.

Separating spaces for online work and home life has helped me draw a sharp dividing line between my responsibilities to family and employer. The rise of telecommuting, supercharged by the pandemic, seems to have been a mixed bag, even for employees who enjoy it. Workers have more flexibility, but they are now expected to be reachable beyond work hours. Burnout persists. Working from home with children in the house has its own challenges.

Shopping requires careful planning. Without Amazon, we buy most of our goods in person at stores in town. We still order things online, but we can’t do it impulsively, and we buy fewer things as a result. While I was out shopping recently, I called Cristina at home to see if she needed anything at the store. “Just text me a list,” I said, completely forgetting that she quite literally could not. So we made our list the old-fashioned way. We talked about what we needed and I wrote it on a piece of paper.

[Read: The best thing about Amazon was never going to last]

I acknowledge the immense privilege of being able to choose to opt out of a service that people rely on to get by in daily life. I also benefit from work that can be done partially on my own schedule and a job that provides parental leave, which was when we made this decision. But now that we have made this change in our lives, I will grieve if we ever have to return to the life we had before. Our tech-lite experiment will only become more difficult in the future, as more parts of our society require online connection to function. As our child grows, he will no doubt start to wonder why we don’t have the same access his friends have. What if he attends a school that requires online homework? Will we be those parents who resist? My own work in the future might not be possible offline.

Still, we’re not the only ones exploring ways to limit technology’s role in our lives. England recently advised schools to impose complete bans on cellphone use, a move that is slowly being adopted by some American school districts. A subset of Americans who want more control over their digital life are trading their smartphones for old-fashioned flip phones; Gen Z teenagers are leading the charge. It’s no mystery why vacationers are flocking to vacation rentals that offer “off-the-grid” properties without internet service as though it’s a special luxury.

Most people won’t—or can’t—go as far as we did. But they can set aside space in their lives uncluttered by devices, or their insatiable demand for our attention. Establishing a space beyond tech’s reach is a way of declaring independence from our unsettling reliance on technology. It reminds us that we can live and thrive without it—and happily so. Our family certainly has.

“I like you better without the internet,” Cristina told me recently.

So do I.

Read more...

Before Barbie, the most subversively pink product to combust its way through Hollywood of late was Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a pastel-hued rape-revenge thriller with a sting in its tail. Fennell loves to manipulate cinematic tropes into discomfiting shapes. Her debut feature, which starred Carey Mulligan as a med-school dropout on a mission to ensnare predatory men, layered jagged themes—trauma, violence, female rage—with beguiling, poppy visuals. Promising Young Woman, while alarming some critics, was widely praised as a fascinating excavation of rape culture. And yet, by winking in the film at well-known touchstones of the aughts, Fennell seemed to be doing something else too: digging into recent history until she found the rotten foundations underneath.

The movie debuted at Sundance in January 2020. Over the course of about 18 months, Fennell went into lockdown with her baby, embarked on a vigorous press campaign conducted almost entirely over Zoom, became the first British woman to be nominated for a directing Oscar, got pregnant with her second child, and then won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the stilted, socially distanced 2021 ceremony in Los Angeles. None of it felt quite real. Her experience of the film’s success was mediated mostly through screens. Like many other people, she sought out creative outlets in isolation; rather than baking banana bread or learning to needlepoint, though, she art-directed and photographed herself in a Valley of the Dolls–style shoot for W magazine, playing a character who was part Factory girl, part murderous fembot.

[Read: Promising Young Woman sets a ravishing trap]

After the movie’s release, Fennell started receiving offers, enticing ones, from “people you’ve wanted to work with your whole life,” she told me over coffee at a hotel in London earlier this fall. But the pandemic, and being at home, allowed her to avoid what she saw as distracting temptations. Instead, she quietly finished writing her second project, the new country-house thriller Saltburn. At first watch, I couldn’t quite trace a path from Promising Young Woman, a movie that hews so closely to the female experience that it stayed lodged in my brain for weeks after, to Saltburn, a Gothic, morbidly funny film that technically fails the Bechdel Test. Having preoccupied herself for much of her career with stories about women—the second season of Killing Eve, for which she served as showrunner; her novel Monsters; and a sizable number of projects that never made it off the page—Fennell wanted to do something different.

Both films share Fennell’s tendency to contrast the grand with the intimate—formal, meticulously arranged tableaus followed by shots so close up that you can almost smell them. She also makes a case for herself as an auteur firmly rooted in Millennial culture: an artist whose aesthetic feels as informed by the bubblegum, color-drenched landscapes of Sweet Valley High and She’s All That as by erudite directorial idols such as Catherine Breillat and Peter Greenaway. Both movies, she said, “share a preoccupation with genre, and how you can abuse it, squeeze it out.” With Promising Young Woman, Fennell juxtaposed its rape-revenge plot with Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and a supporting cast ripped from The O.C., Friday Night Lights, and Veronica Mars. With Saltburn, which is set in England around 2006, she wanted to replicate that era just a beat before it becomes cool and nostalgic again.

The movie follows Oliver (played by Barry Keoghan), a northern-English first-year student at Oxford who becomes infatuated with Felix (Jacob Elordi), the dazzling, frivolous heir to an aristocratic family whose stately home gives the film its title. Fennell has long been fascinated by outsider narratives such as Brideshead Revisited and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and she’s drawn in particular to the yearning at their core—a kind of want so intense that it can easily turn dangerous. “When you look at online trolls, so much of the root of that is desire,” Fennell said. “So much of it is a furious kind of weird death-love … the fetishy relationship that we have with the things that we want, and then the way we immediately deflect that into disgust.” Saltburn’s exploration of that psychology seems pulled directly from classic 20th-century novels—Oliver is a character who could fit into virtually any historical moment—even as its visual preoccupation with the aughts alludes to that decade’s powerful influence on our understanding of intimacy and longing.

In person, Fennell is a mix of beguiling, patrician charisma (she played Camilla Parker Bowles in Seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown) and cheerful deviance. Toward the end of our meeting, she leaned forward, lowered her voice slightly, and offered to tell me the best way to kill my husband; a few minutes earlier, she’d apologized for making a gesture that she thought made her look like she was acting out the “I’m a Little Teapot” nursery rhyme. In her 2015 novel, Monsters, which she wrote between seasons of playing Nurse Patsy in the BBC show Call the Midwife, Fennell describes a body that washes ashore as being “like a chicken leg that had been stewed too long”; each time the locals tried to collect it, “a piece of sodden flesh slid off the bone.” On the page, her mordant sensibility can be unnerving, but on film, paired with her precise eye for both painterly staging and aughts-era ugliness—she insisted, to the dismay of Saltburn’s male producers, that Felix have an eyebrow piercing—it entices as much as it appalls. (After a screening I went to, a woman outside shook her head and blurted out, “Dark as fuck!” to no one in particular.)

When she was working on the script for Saltburn, Fennell toyed with the idea of setting it on a moneyed American campus—less Brideshead, more The Secret History. She concluded that the story would be stronger the better she knew it, and that the particular intricacies of the English class system were more loaded. “The thing about these worlds is that they’re so tricksy, so designed,” she said. The rules “are constantly shifting, constantly different from place to place.” A particularly poignant moment in the movie sees Oliver, invited to spend the summer at Felix’s ancestral home, show up at the iron-wrought gates with a wheelie suitcase, a tiny figure facing an impenetrable fortress of accreted privilege. At breakfast, he humiliates himself by not knowing the right way to ask for eggs.

Fennell grew up in London; her father is the jeweler Theo Fennell, and her mother is a writer whose instincts, Fennell has said, are even darker than hers. Fennell started acting as a way to get out of organized sports at school, and was spotted by an agent in a play when she was at Oxford. Her family is eminently well connected: The actor Richard E. Grant, who plays Sir James Catton, the patriarch of Saltburn, is a family friend, as is the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who commissioned Fennell to write the book for a musical adaptation of Cinderella that premiered in 2021. Fennell’s web of family ties is part of what makes Saltburn’s theory of privilege so intriguing. If she is on a particular side, shall we say, it isn’t the Cattons’. “It was really important to me,” she said, “that if this is a vampire story, they’re the vampires.” Fennell admits she could draw “a pretty clear line from my own personality to Elspeth,” Felix’s theatrical mother (Rosamund Pike), who has a phobic aversion to unattractiveness and paraphrases her daughter’s eating disorder as “fingers for pudding.” Saltburn, like the Jordan Peele film Get Out, is a horror story in which the monster is sociological; it’s been inside us all along. Keoghan’s unsettling performance, which switches modes constantly, is indelible, Fennell thinks, because he’s fully animal in an otherwise bloodless, highly artificial world.

[Read: Curse of the ’90s bombshell]

Elordi’s Felix, by contrast, is a character more like the genial-seeming bros in Promising Young Woman: as handsome as he is weak. In one scene at Oxford, he picks a conquest at random and then, in Fennell’s description, “takes her away with a slap on the arse without even speaking to her or looking at her.” She wanted Felix’s character to make people think about “the limits of the lies when it comes to seduction,” and how most men, rather than being heroes or villains, tend to be likable guys “who can’t quite be good enough” when they’re required to be. In real life, Fennell has been in a relationship with her husband, the producer Chris Vernon, for almost 20 years, allowing her an emotional continuity and stability that free up her imagination: “I was always with him, which meant that so much of my brain wasn’t, I don’t know, fretting. It does give you so much time to devote to the other world. Because really the only thing that keeps me sane is being in the other world.”

When Promising Young Woman came out, Fennell was feted for having directed it while heavily pregnant, an experience that she said was a breeze compared to shooting Saltburn with two young children. Most of the movie was filmed in Northamptonshire, on location. “And so I rented a house five minutes away, and was like, ‘It’s amazing, I can get the kids to bed every night,’” she said. “And then, of course, what it meant was that I had to put the kids to bed every night.” She’d wake up at five in the morning, go straight to set, come home for bathtime: “It was just a new kind of exhaustion. I think I’ve been running on adrenaline for five years now.” Even more challenging than those logistics was what she described as the “Gothic intensity” of motherhood, its lacerating vulnerability. (She had a cameo in Barbie as Midge, the discontinued pregnant doll with a detachable belly.) “The world’s way of dealing with it is to pretend it’s this nice thing,” Fennell said. “Everything’s soft. Everything’s pink. And it’s so fucking hard-core. It’s death metal.”

This same specific tension—between visual sumptuousness and narrative brutality—undergirds her filmmaking style. Her creative landscape is as macabre as that of David Lynch or Breillat, the French filmmaker whose 1999 movie, Romance, helped kick off an art-house obsession with extreme sex and violence. (Fennell thought a lot, during Saltburn, about Breillat’s belief that sex is a dance between beauty and revulsion.) Fennell’s work is also governed, though, by the sense memories of being alive in the ’90s and 2000s: the way she felt when she saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the particular clickety-clack of the cheap accessories that she has Felix’s haughty sister, Venetia, wear in Saltburn, to make her less intimidating. For the Oxford scenes, Fennell wanted armpit hair, sweat, and visible pores, as well as Livestrong wristbands, Bic lighters, and hot-pink velour Juicy Couture sweatpants. The plasticized sparkle makes the language, the interplay among the characters, only more loaded. The themes and formulaic conventions Fennell works with might be familiar, but the vibes she evokes seem intended to hook us more intimately into her toxic world, one gleaming detail or evocative needle drop at a time.

It wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me.

He is, famously, no friend of the media. But Thiel—co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left—consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los Angeles. He was more open than I expected him to be, and he had a lot to say.

But the impetus for these conversations? He wanted me to publish a promise he was going to make, so that he would not be tempted to go back on his word. And what was that thing he needed to say, loudly? That he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician, including Donald Trump, in the next presidential campaign.

Already, he has endured the wrath of Trump. Thiel tried to duck Trump’s calls for a while, but in late April the former president managed to get him on the phone. Trump reminded Thiel that he had backed two of Thiel’s protégés, Blake Masters and J. D. Vance, in their Senate races last year. Thiel had given each of them more than $10 million; now Trump wanted Thiel to give the same to him.

When Thiel declined, Trump “told me that he was very sad, very sad to hear that,” Thiel recounted. “He had expected way more of me. And that’s how the call ended.”

Months later, word got back to Thiel that Trump had called Masters to discourage him from running for Senate again, and had called Thiel a “fucking scumbag.”

Thiel’s hope was that this article would “lock me into not giving any money to Republican politicians in 2024,” he said. “There’s always a chance I might change my mind. But by talking to you, it makes it hard for me to change my mind. My husband doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right. I know they’re going to be pestering me like crazy. And by talking to you, it’s going to lock me out of the cycle for 2024.”

This matters because of Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.

And why does he want to cut off politicians? It’s not that they are mediocre as individuals, and therefore incapable of bringing about the kinds of civilization-defining changes a man like him would expect to see. His disappointment runs deeper than that. Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

Not for the first time, Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel’s decision to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 surprised some of his closest friends. Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

But four months earlier, Thiel had seen an omen. On March 18, 2016, a jury delivered an extraordinary $115 million verdict to Hulk Hogan in his invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media, whose website had published portions of a sex tape featuring Hogan. Thiel had secretly funded the litigation against Gawker, which had mocked him for years and outed him as gay. The verdict drove the company out of business.

For Thiel, the outcome was more than vindication. It was a sign. When the jury came back, “my instant reaction at that point was ‘Wow, maybe Trump wins the election,’” he told me. In his mind, Gawker was a stand-in for the media writ large, hostile to the presumptive Republican nominee; Hogan was a Trumplike figure; and the jury—the voters—had taken his side.

Thiel himself had not yet publicly embraced Trump. In the Republican primary, he had backed Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and a fellow Stanford alum, with a $2 million contribution. Though his candidate had lost, he planned to attend the RNC as a delegate.

Then came a call from Donald Trump Jr. Thiel had never met father or son, and had yet to give money to Trump’s campaign, but the younger Trump had noticed his name on the delegate list. The convention was 10 days away, and Trump was short on high-profile endorsements. “Do you want to speak?” Don Jr. asked. Thiel thought it might be fun.

He sounded out his old friend Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who has since become his political nemesis. “We were talking, and he said, ‘I think I’m going to—I’m considering going and giving a speech at the Republican National Convention,’” Hoffman recalled. “And I laughed, thinking he was joking. Right? And it was like, ‘No, no, no, I’m not joking.’”

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.” His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“‘Make America great again’ was the most pessimistic slogan of any candidate in 100 years, because you were saying that we are no longer a great country,” Thiel told me. “And that was a shocking slogan for a major presidential candidate.”

He thought people needed to hear it. Thiel gave $1.25 million to the Trump campaign, and had an office in Trump Tower during the transition, where he suggested candidates for jobs in the incoming administration. (His protégé Michael Kratsios was named chief technology officer, but few of Thiel’s other candidates got jobs.)

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

But if supporting Trump was a gamble, Thiel told me, it’s not one he regrets.

Reid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment. “Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

Disillusionment was a recurring theme in my conversations with Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker. Yet he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

Born in Germany, the son of a mining engineer, Thiel lived briefly in South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) as a child but grew up primarily in Ohio and California. After graduating from Stanford and then Stanford Law, he worked briefly on the East Coast before heading back to Silicon Valley.

In 1998, Thiel teamed up with Max Levchin, a brilliant computer scientist, and together they founded the company that became PayPal, with the declared purpose of creating a libertarian alternative to government currency. That grand ambition went unfulfilled, but PayPal turned out to be a terrific way to pay for online purchases, which were growing exponentially. In 2002, eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion.

In 2004, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a private intelligence firm that does data mining for government and private clients at home and abroad. The CIA’s venture-capital arm, called In-Q-Tel, was his first outside investor.

This was also the year he placed the most celebrated wager in the history of venture capital. He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012. He came to regret the sale, however; at Facebook’s market peak, in 2021, his stake would have been worth many times more.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied. But on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it. But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine. He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Thiel does not believe death is inevitable. Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,” he said. He has spent enormous sums trying to evade his own end but feels that, if anything, he should devote even more time and money to solving the problem of human mortality.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Adam Kirsch on the people cheering for humanity’s end]

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings? I wondered.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves. “And then there are sort of all these questions, you know: How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

“So why can’t we be elves?” I asked.

Thiel nodded reverently, his expression a blend of hope and chagrin.

“Why can’t we be elves?” he said.

Thiel’s abandonment of Trump is not the first time he has decided to step away from politics.

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz and the anti-tax Club for Growth’s super PAC.

But something changed for Thiel in 2009, the first of several swings of his political pendulum. That year he wrote a manifesto titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he disavowed electoral politics as a vehicle for reshaping society. The people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

It was a striking declaration. An even more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (He elaborated, after some backlash, that he did not literally oppose women’s suffrage, but neither did he affirm his support for it.)

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach—spheres where the choices of one great man could still be paramount. “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution.” His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics.” (I tried to reach Musk at X, requesting an interview, but got a poop emoji in response.)

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters. This, Thiel believed, was a more realistic path toward functioning libertarian societies in the short term than colonizing space. He gave substantial sums to Patri Friedman, the grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, to establish the nonprofit Seasteading Institute.

Thiel told a room full of believers at an institute conference in 2009 that most people don’t think seasteading is possible and will therefore not interfere until it’s too late. “The question of whether seasteading is desirable or possible in my mind is not even relevant,” he said. “It is absolutely necessary.”

Engineering challenges aside, Max Levchin, his friend and PayPal co-founder, dismissed the idea that Thiel would ever actually move to one of these specks in the sea. “There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape. He already had German and American citizenship, but he invested millions of dollars in New Zealand and obtained citizenship there in 2011. He bought a former sheep station on 477 acres in the lightly populated South Island that had the makings of an End Times retreat in the country where the Lord of the Rings films were shot. Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

[From the September 2023 issue: Ross Andersen on Sam Altman’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence]

Over and over, Thiel has voiced his discontent with what’s become of the grand dreams of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in his Seasteading Institute keynote. “You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias. The tech boom brought us the iPhone and Uber and social media, none of them a fundamental improvement to the human condition. He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

For a time, Thiel thought he knew how to set things right. Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 2005 with Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, published a manifesto that complained, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

I joined Thiel one recent Tuesday afternoon for a videoconference to review a pair of start-ups in his portfolio. In his little box on the Zoom screen, he looked bored.

Daniel Yu, connecting from Zanzibar, made a short, lucid presentation. His company, Wasoko, was an ecommerce platform for mom-and-pop stores in Africa, supplying shopkeepers with rice, soap, toilet paper, and other basics. Africa is the fastest-urbanizing region in the world, and Wasoko’s gross margin had doubled since last year.

Thiel was looking down at his briefing papers. He read something about Wasoko becoming “the Alibaba of Africa”—a pet peeve. “Anything that’s the something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere,” he said, a little sourly.

Next up was a company called Laika Mascotas, in Bogotá. Someone on the call described it as the Chewy of Latin America. Thiel frowned. The company delivered pet supplies directly to the homes of consumers. It had quadrupled its revenues every year for three years. The CEO, Camilo Sánchez Villamarin, walked through the numbers. Thiel thanked him and signed off.

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

The trouble is not exactly that Thiel’s portfolio is pedestrian or uninspired. Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

“Because you couldn’t find those companies?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.”

In 2018, a Russian named Daniil Bisslinger handed Thiel his business card. The card described him as a foreign-service officer. Thiel understood otherwise. He believed that Bisslinger was an intelligence officer with the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. (A U.S. intelligence official later told me Thiel was right. The Russian embassy in Berlin, where Bisslinger has been based, did not respond to questions about him.)

Thiel received an invitation that day, and then again in January 2022, to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No agenda was specified. Thiel had been fascinated by Putin’s czarlike presence in a room in Davos years before, all “champagne and caviar, and you had sort of this gaggle of, I don’t know, Mafia-like-looking oligarchs standing around him,” he recalled, but he did not make the trip.

Instead, he reported the contact to the FBI, for which Thiel had become a confidential human source code-named “Philosopher.” Thiel’s role as an FBI informant, first reported by Insider, dated back to May 2021. Charles Johnson, a tech investor, right-wing attention troll, and longtime associate of Thiel’s, told me he himself had become an FBI informant some time ago. Johnson introduced Thiel to FBI Special Agent Johnathan Buma.

A source with close knowledge of the relationship said Buma told Thiel that he did not want to know about Thiel’s contacts with U.S. elected officials or political figures, which were beyond the FBI’s investigative interests. Buma saw his interactions with Thiel, this source said, as strictly “a counterintelligence, anti-influence operation” directed at foreign governments.

Thiel responded to my questions about his FBI relationship with a terse “no comment.” A close associate, speaking with Thiel’s permission, said “it would be strange if Peter had never met with people from the deep state,” including “three-letter agencies, especially given the fact that he founded Palantir 20 years ago.”

Johnson told me he knows he has a reputation as a right-wing agitator, but said that he had fostered that image in order to gather information for the FBI and other government agencies. (He said he is now a supporter of President Joe Biden.) “I recognize that I’m an imperfect messenger,” he said. He told me a great many things about Thiel and others that I could not verify, but knowledgeable sources confirmed his role in recruiting Thiel for Buma. He and Thiel have since fallen out. “We are taking a permanent break from one another,” Thiel texted Johnson about a year ago. “Starting now.”

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

In Thiel’s Los Angeles office, he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

Thiel saw the sculpture at a gallery in Auckland in December 2017. He loved the piece, perceiving it, he told me, as “sympathetic to roughly my side” of the political spectrum. (In fact, the artist intended it as a critique.) At the same show, he bought a portrait of his friend Curtis Yarvin, an explicitly antidemocratic writer who calls for a strong-armed leader to govern the United States as a monarch. Thiel gave the painting to Yarvin as a gift.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

This felt like a debater’s riposte, not to be taken seriously. He had given a more honest answer before that: He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian. “One of the big things that he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in this reading of history, used a domineering view of executive authority, a compliant Congress, and an intimidated Supreme Court to force what Thiel called “very, very drastic change in the nature of our society.” Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

It would be hard to find an academic historian to endorse the view that fascism, light or otherwise, accounted for Roosevelt’s presidential power. But I was interested in something else: Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

Looking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line. He was disenchanted with the former president, who did not turn out to be the revolutionary Thiel had hoped he might be. A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

The first time Thiel and I spoke, I asked about the nature of his disappointment. Later, he referred back to that question in a way that suggested he felt constrained. “I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Discouraged by Trump’s performance, Thiel had quietly stepped aside in the 2020 election. He wrote no check to the second Trump campaign, and said little or nothing about it in public. He had not made any grand resolution to stay out. He just wasn’t moved to get in.

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on Donald Trump’s next coup]

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instance: Thiel thought Gore was probably the rightful victor. Before that, he’d gotten started on a riff about Kennedy-Nixon.

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

Trump’s lies about the election were, however, a big issue in last year’s midterms. Thiel was a major donor to J. D. Vance, who won his Senate race in Ohio, and Blake Masters, who lost in Arizona. Both ran as election deniers, as did many of the other House and Senate candidates Thiel funded that year. Thiel expressed no anxieties about their commitment to election denial.  

But now, heading into 2024, he was getting out of politics again. Beyond his disappointment with Trump, there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss. In July, Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politics. (The reported leaders of the oppo campaign did not respond to my questions.) Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

Thiel declined to comment on Thomas’s death, citing the family’s request for privacy. He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,” he said.

On the last Thursday in April, Thiel stood in a ballroom at the Metropolitan Club, one of New York’s finest Gilded Age buildings. Decorative marble fireplaces accented the intricate panel work in burgundy and gold, all beneath Renaissance-style ceiling murals. Thiel had come to receive an award from The New Criterion, a conservative magazine of literature and politics, and to bask in the attention of nearly 300 fans.

These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing.

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.” Evil, he explained, because “the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

His closing, which used the same logic, earned a standing ovation.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests. Thiel answered with an unprompted jab at a fellow billionaire.

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

Thiel sometimes uses Gates as a foil in his public remarks, so I asked him what he thought of the Giving Pledge, the campaign Gates conceived in 2010—with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett—to persuade billionaires to give away more than half their wealth to charitable causes. (Disclosure: One of my sons works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

“I don’t want to waste Bill Gates’s time,” Thiel replied.

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them. The prevailing view in Europe, he said, and more and more in the United States, “is that philanthropy is something an evil person does.” It raises a question, he said: “What are you atoning for?”

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

And besides, a different cause moves him far more.   

One night in 1999, or possibly 2000, Thiel went to a party in Palo Alto with Max Levchin, where they heard a pitch for an organization called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Alcor was trying to pioneer a practical method of biostasis, a way to freeze the freshly dead in hope of revivification one day. Don’t picture the reanimation of an old, enfeebled corpse, enthusiasts at the party told Levchin. “The idea, of course, is that long before we know how to revive dead people, we would learn how to repair your cellular membranes and make you young and virile and beautiful and muscular, and then we’ll revive you,” Levchin recalled.

Levchin found the whole thing morbid and couldn’t wait to get out of there. But Thiel signed up as an Alcor client.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by. The moment he is declared legally dead, medical technicians will connect him to a machine that will restore respiration and blood flow to his corpse. This step is temporary, meant to protect his brain and slow “the dying process.”

“The patient,” as Alcor calls its dead client, “is then cooled in an ice water bath, and their blood is replaced with an organ preservation solution.” Next, ideally within the hour, Thiel’s remains will be whisked to an operating room in Scottsdale, Arizona. A medical team will perfuse cryoprotectants through his blood vessels in an attempt to reduce the tissue damage wrought by extreme cold. Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

Thiel knows that cryonics “is still not working that well.” When flesh freezes, he said, neurons and cellular structures get damaged. But he figures cryonics is “better than the alternative”—meaning the regular kind of death that nobody comes back from.

Of course, if he had the choice, Thiel would prefer not to die in the first place. In the 2000s, he became enamored with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from England who predicted that science would soon enable someone to live for a thousand years. By the end of that span, future scientists would have devised a way to extend life still further, and so on to immortality.

A charismatic figure with a prodigious beard and a doctorate from Cambridge, de Grey resembled an Orthodox priest in mufti. He preached to Thiel for hours at a time about the science of regeneration. De Grey called his research program SENS, short for “strategies for engineered negligible senescence.”

Thiel gave several million dollars to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, helping fund a lucrative prize for any scientist who could stretch the life span of mice to unnatural lengths. Four such prizes were awarded, but no human applications have yet emerged.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

If anything, Thiel thinks about death more than they do—and kicks himself for not thinking about it enough. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

And then he made an uncomfortable admission about that frozen death vault in Scottsdale, dipping his head and giving a half-smile of embarrassment. “I don’t know if that would actually happen,” he said. “I don’t even know where the contracts are, where all the records are, and so—and then of course you’d have to have the people around you know where to do it, and they’d have to be informed. And I haven’t broadcast it.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?

“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

He picked up his hand and gestured. Stop. Enough about his family.

Thiel already does a lot of things to try to extend his life span: He’s on a Paleo diet; he works out with a trainer. He suspects that nicotine is a “really good nootropic drug that raises your IQ 10 points,” and is thinking about adding a nicotine patch to his regimen. He has spoken of using human-growth-hormone pills to promote muscle mass. Until recently he was taking semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic; lately he has switched to a weekly injection of Mounjaro, an antidiabetic drug commonly used for weight loss. He doses himself with another antidiabetic, metformin, because he thinks it has a “significant effect in suppressing the cancer risk.”

In the HBO series Silicon Valley, one of the characters (though not the one widely thought to be modeled on Thiel) had a “blood boy” who gave him regular transfusions of youthful serum. I thought Thiel would laugh at that reference, but he didn’t.

“I’ve looked into all these different, I don’t know, somewhat heterodox things,” he said, noting that parabiosis, as the procedure is called, seems to slow aging in mice. He wishes the science were more advanced. No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

“There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.

It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersch had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.

As Rachel stared at her son from across the table, she marveled at his hard-earned sense of ease. When the Goldberg-Polin family emigrated from Richmond, Virginia, in 2008, when Hersh was 7, he had initially struggled to adapt, to learn the language, to shake his sense of being an outsider. But here he was, vividly recounting picaresque stories of his time abroad. He said that the thing he’d enjoyed most about Europe was that he didn’t need to bathe, because rivers were so ubiquitous and he could always plunge into one.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Geography, travel, and the endless wonders of the planet were his lifelong passions, and wanderlust his state of equilibrium. Before his bar mitzvah, he told those invited that he wanted gifts of maps and atlases. Although his parents never asked probing questions about the career he might pursue, his father imagined that Hersh’s curiosities might lead him to become a journalist for National Geographic.  

At 11 p.m., Hersh told his mother that he was leaving to meet up with his friend Aner Shapira. He didn’t go into detail about his plans, but he was wearing his backpack. He kissed her and then left her to sip her tea and pick at the remnants on her plate of desserts, to savor the respite of Shabbat.

At 7:30 the next morning, Jon Polin left for synagogue. He’d been assigned to serve as that morning’s gabbai, charged with orchestrating the logistics of the service. On his walk, he heard the distant sound of explosions. A stranger stopped him in the street. “There is a strong attack in the south.” Polin thanked the man and went on his way.

Not long after, sirens began blaring, the cue for residents to make their way to bomb shelters. At the family’s home, Rachel woke her two daughters and led them to the basement. When they emerged, after the warnings abated, she decided that circumstances demanded she check her phone, breaking the prohibition of using devices on the day of rest. Two text messages from Hersh instantly appeared.

“I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Rachel knew that Hersh would only apologize like that for causing her pain and worry. She called his phone, but reached voicemail.

“Are you ok?” she texted.  

And again, “Let me know you’re ok.”

Her daughters began to scan social media furiously, where they encountered videos from a music festival in the south, images of screaming youths, sounds of gunfire. Is this where he went? Rachel didn’t know.

Rachel sent the link to the festival’s website to Hersh’s friend Yaniv. “Are they here?” He quickly replied that they were.

Jon returned early from synagogue, where the congregants had agreed to cancel the remainder of services, after their third trip to the building’s shelter. But he didn’t have an inkling of his son’s peril until Rachel showed him the text messages from Hersh and told him, “I think we have a problem.”

Their laptops and phones, now turned on, began to unfurl the horrors of the morning: the massacres at the kibbutzim, the reports of hundreds dead at the festival, the others abducted by Hamas.

Another friend, Omer, took it upon himself to design a digital missing-persons poster, with a photo of Hersh and Aner, which he posted on social media and circulated widely.

Suddenly, there was too much information to sort through: so many horrifying videos to watch, so many eyewitness reports, so many text messages, except for the one text message they most deeply wanted.

It was strange that he hadn’t called. Rachel began to tell herself stories to explain away that fact. Maybe he lost his phone in the chaos. Maybe Hersh and Aner ran into the bush and were now walking the hundred kilometers to Jerusalem. Maybe they were in a place with no cell signal. Maybe, maybe, God willing, just maybe.  

Then came the knocks on the door, as a cavalcade of concerned friends began to show up at the apartment. By 2 p.m., there were eight of them, working the phones, scouring the internet. They found a list of survivors clustered at one kibbutz, then a separate list from a different village. They saw Hersh’s and Aner’s names. But when the friends made calls to verify the lists, they learned that they were inaccurate.

As the hours mounted, Rachel knew that the stories she was telling herself weren’t believable either. There’s no way that nobody in the entire south has a phone he can use to just say, “I’m alive.”  

Earlier in the day, Rachel and Jon had reported Hersh as missing. When the police finally called, they asked them to bring anything with Hersh’s DNA to the station. They found an old toothbrush and stray hairs on his pillowcase—quotidian traces of his life that could be used to confirm his death.

What felt like a breakthrough came late at night: The friends found a photo from a bomb shelter near the festival. Amazingly, they could see Aner standing in the doorway. And there was Hersh, along with kids wearing sunglasses casually perched on their head, some checking their phones. By Israeli standards, the scene looked strangely normal. They began to hear reports that the terrorists had killed hundreds of festival-goers, but now they possessed material evidence that Hersh could plausibly be among the living.

At 4 a.m., Jon received a message from a cousin. “I feel terrible sending this to you, but it was sent to me and I feel like I have to show it to you. Don’t show it to Rachel.” It was an article from an Indian publication about the murder of a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin, his body found in the West Bank. Jon felt sick to his stomach. But he also paused at the incongruities. The article noted that Hersh was a 25-year-old student. He was neither 25 nor a student. And how would his body have ended up in the West Bank?

Jon did show the article to Rachel, and she sent it to a reporter from ABC News who had contacted her earlier in the day and struck her as a sympathetic soul. “Please, can you send this to a fact-checking desk for confirmation?” The reporter said he would—and eventually, he relayed that his team had debunked the account.

After daybreak, Rachel and Jon called a retired police officer they knew. She told them, “I’m coming over now.” She drove them to an improvised police station, next to Ben Gurion Airport, set up for families of the missing—an ingathering of the dazed. They made their way through a crowd of hundreds of others searching for their loved ones. It wasn’t chaotic; everyone was too stricken for that. As Rachel remembered the scene: “It was like we all walked in with third-degree burns. That’s how the police were treating us. They were just so careful, and they knew nothing. So we were doing everything we could do, but there was nothing to do.”

At home, they heard about a girl who’d just been released from the hospital. In the photo from the bomb shelter, Hersh sat next to her, his arm around her. Jon and Rachel desperately wanted to talk to her, to glean whatever she knew about his fate.

Rachel called the girl’s mother, who said that her daughter was too traumatized to talk. Rachel responded, “I’m a mother and I understand, but we don’t know if Hersh is dead or alive, and your daughter might know something. So when she is ready, and I know she can’t do it tonight, please have her call me.”

At the end of the day, the couple told their friends that they wanted to get some sleep. But really, they needed time to themselves. In the privacy of their bedroom, they allowed themselves to say a fatalistic thing: We’re the parents of a boy who’s dead. They began to talk about how they might need to pick themselves up, for the sake of their daughters. It was a rare time in their marriage that Rachel saw Jon heaving, and witnessed the uncontrolled rush of tears.

The next morning, another survivor from the bomb shelter called. They placed the phone on the coffee table and put her on speaker. They asked their friend Rotem to take the lead in the conversation. Jon and Rachel, both natives of Chicago, spoke Hebrew with a foreign accent. Rotem didn’t, and they hoped that might make this young woman feel more comfortable reciting uncomfortable truths.

Haltingly, carefully, she began to narrate. The last time she saw him, Hersh was alive, but he had hurt his hand. The Hebrew word yad can mean hand or arm. And the way she used it struck Rotem as curious. “Was it a serious injury or did he just hurt his hand?” She replied, “He’s okay, but he definitely hurt his hand.”

After they hung up, Rotem called the survivor back, without Rachel and Jon in the room. He pressed her to be less cautious. It turned out that the Hamas assailants had lobbed grenades into the bunker. Aner had picked them up and hurled them back outside. And then she revealed the hard truth she had blunted earlier: Hersh lost his arm, from the elbow down, in the attack.

As Rotem relayed the information to Hersh’s parents, Rachel was beside herself. Hersh is left-handed—and that was the arm he now longer possessed. She exclaimed, “Did he just die in that field? Did he? How much can this child take?”

Rotem also needed them to know that he had collected an even more gruesome piece of testimony in the course of his efforts. He had spoken with a man in search of his own son. On October 7, he’d entered the bomb shelter and found seven young Israelis lying under a carpet of corpses, feigning their own death for four and a half hours. He told them, “I’m Israeli. I’m a private citizen. I’m here with my vehicle. Anybody who’s still conscious, get up right now and I’m taking you to the hospital.” The man told Rotem, “Based on what I saw in that bomb shelter, I’m sorry to say that there’s no chance that Aner is alive.”

With each day that passed, their chronology of October 7 thickened. One woman recounted to Rachel and Jon how Hamas terrorists had pulled Hersh from the bunker, his arm now wrapped in a tourniquet, and aggressively loaded him onto a truck. The police said that they had traced Hersh’s cellphone, and that they had last encountered it on the border with Gaza.

Although the government assigned them two case workers, the authorities seemed to have no independent sense of the timeline of that day, and no hard information about Hersh’s condition. Almost everything substantial that the Goldberg-Polins learned came from the investigation that they had conducted themselves. As the grim new reality of their lives settled over them, the couple made a calculated decision: They would push on every door. Whenever the global news media asked for an interview, they granted one. One American TV anchor tried to nudge Rachel to wear makeup: “You might make viewers uncomfortable.” Rachel replied, “I want to make them feel uncomfortable.”

Hope, or what now constituted hope, came in the form of Anderson Cooper. In the course of filming a long segment about October 7, the CNN anchor came across footage on the phone of an Israeli soldier. As he saw the video, Cooper gasped, “Jesus Christ.” He recognized Hersh’s face. There was Hersh hoisting himself onto a pickup truck with his remaining arm, his nondominant one. It was a terrible image: Blood was everywhere, on his face, on his leg. Cooper tried to break the news gently to Jon and Rachel: “I have a video of your son and I’m going to send it now. It’s a hard video to watch.”

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

Still, they could see Hersh using his own two feet; they could see that he possessed the power to lift himself onto the flatbed, despite his loss of blood. Jon told me, “You live in a reality where you want to hear that your kid was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, because that’s better than the alternative. It frames for you the alternative reality that we live in, which enables me to take strength from seeing my son with a blown-off limb.”

When I spoke with Hersh’s parents via Zoom, they were in their apartment in the southeast quadrant of Jerusalem, sitting on a couch in front of an unadorned wall. Rachel told me that they had both lost substantial weight. The Jewish impulse to feed the suffering felt like an affront, which they both resisted. “I’m not sure if Hersh is alive. I am not going to be eating cake,” Rachel said.

They narrated their story with a sense of detachment, the numbness that allows the mind to function in the midst of a living nightmare. I noted that fact to Rachel, who wore a sticker with a 26 on her T-shirt, the number of days since Hamas had blown off her son’s arm and abducted him. She didn’t disagree. “I tell everyone that I’m going to go downstairs and cry now and that I’ll be back in a few minutes. And I’ll go into our bedroom and I’ll cry, and I’ll scream into a T-shirt, and I’ll just be beside myself. Then I’ll wipe my face and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got work to do.’ And I come back upstairs.” Each interview is a shout in the darkness, an exhaustion of their obligation to avail themselves of every opportunity to remind the world of Hersh’s existence.

I told her that I wanted to help Hersh get started in journalism, if that’s what he wanted and if he managed to survive. She thanked me, then corrected me: “Please, it’s when, not if.”