Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

In elementary school he’d read the Harry Potter books over and over. By the eighth grade he had stopped reading books altogether. “You start to associate it with a negative feeling, and you stop liking it,” he said. “I started to associate books with a thing I didn’t like.” He kept his thoughts about the literary-industrial establishment to himself through middle school, but by high school they began to leak out of him. “I objected to the fundamental reality of the entire class,” said Sam of English. “All of a sudden I was being told I was wrong—about a thing it was impossible to be wrong about. The thing that offended me is that it wasn’t honest with itself. It was subjectivity framed as objectivity. All the grading was arbitrary. I don’t even know how you grade it. I disagreed with the implicit factual claims behind the things that got good grades.” He’d sat through middle school in a stupor, but by high school he was sure enough of his own mind that he was willing to challenge his English teachers’ cherished beliefs on grounds unrecognizable to English teachers. Their belief, for instance, that Shakespeare was an especially good writer.