But McCarthy was ready for a change in the early 1960s; when Stanford offered him a full professorship, he took it. He sold his house in Cambridge to two young Harvard professors promoting a tool for hacking the operating system of the human brain: LSD. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert turned the alcove of McCarthy’s old library (which contained equal parts of “science, fiction, and science fiction”) into a rabbit hole that went down to a trip room lined with pillows, black lights, and psychedelic art.
