This longform piece in The New Yorker (it isn’t paywalled and also has an audible version) follows the teaching of an unusual course at the U of C called “Are We Doomed?” The content of that course and the ideas flying around in it (from Plato and Thomas More to Godzilla and Jerry Brown) make interesting reading in their own right. But for me, an alum, what is most interesting is the sketches of some very UChicago types. This starts with the two profs who conduct the course - an astrophysicist “tempted by poetry” in his youth who runs the “Existential Risk Laboratory” at Chicago, and a computational scientist who is also a sociologist and runs something called nothing less than “The Knowledge Lab.” They’re clearly thinkers who are, as one of them says, “open to surprise.” But the heart of the piece is in the brief profiles of some eight current students taking the course, a mixture of grad and undergrad, whose thoughts and comments and even finals projects are described with fascination. They are anything but filled with doom - “talkative, confident, buoyant, very much at ease… I was more than charmed by the students, I admit. Their temperaments were brighter than my own, their thoughts were more surprising. It was a tiny unrepresentative group, but they didn’t resemble ‘young people’ as they are portrayed in popular culture.”
That’s an observation worth remembering the next time you hear that it’s the place fun dies, etc. Nevertheless, there’s this, which tells me that some things don’t change: “Finals week arrived. It’s like the world stops for finals, one student said, of the atmosphere on campus.”
The piece also contains some homages to important bits of University history - the conference room in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics (where the course is taught) overlooking the Henry More sculpture depicting the birth of the nuclear age; the Mansueto Library that now occupies the spot beneath old Stagg field where the first chain reaction was created; Enrico Fermi’s speculations as to why we’re apparently alone in the universe (the “Fermi Paradox”); the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created by Fermi and other Chicago physicists involved in making the bomb - it is still housed on campus (as a student I walked past it every day en route to the quad and noted its hands approaching midnight, a less than cheering beginning of the day!).
This is a good read in general but will have a special resonance if you ever attended or are contemplating attending the University of Chicago.