I finally read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which I bought sometime after Barbenheimer weekend, which feels like about a million years ago now, and reading it now, I kind of can’t help but wonder, what would Oppenheimer have thought of Oppenheimer? What would Oppenheimer have thought of Barbenheimer, for that matter? And I have no idea and have no idea how to even begin to generate an idea here. Other than to note, well, Barbie was introduced in 1959, which. I don’t know. There’s something.

I’m not going to pretend I gained deep insight from the book; there’s a lot of names, there’s a lot of manipulations and events, and I wasn’t reading in a strictly academic sense here, I wasn’t trying to keep all the threads straight. But it still made for an interesting read, if for nothing else than to see how much of the movie did come from the book, and what from the film might have involved a little bit of license-taking, that sort of thing.

The book was more a vibe check, for me, on Oppenheimer, on who really he was, a corrective against my more naive understanding of what he represented or did as part of the Manhattan Project. It’s easy to think, well, okay, father of the atom bomb, he must have done all the science, or whatever, and while he was certainly involved at that level, that wasn’t exactly what he was doing there; he was more a synthesist, by nature, and an administrator, by sheer force of will, a bit Samwise to the collective’s Frodo. (ed. note - bit of a stretch there, bub.)

The book also provides a clearly much more clear sense of his polymath nature—his philosophical ideals and his wide-ranging interests, and the like; wouldn’t it be nice to go read Proust and come out of it feeling like you’ve cured yourself of mental illness? (Apropos of nothing, maybe I’m actually finally going to read Proust in 2025? Maybe?)

It’s also…look, I know everything is terrible right now, and I know everything is about to become more terrible, but…has anything ever been good? Reading any kind of history I tend to walk away thinking: no, not really. I think maybe now we are reaching a point where it’s objectively possible to say things are about the worst they’ve ever been, but, I don’t know. I have so many gaps in my knowledge that I want to keep filling in, and maybe someday if the world lasts long enough I’ll have the opportunity to draw some conclusions, or to at least start. Maybe.