GALAXY BRAIN

HOW THE IMPECCABLY CREDENTIALED, IMPROBABLY CHARMING ECONOMIC HISTORIAN ADAM TOOZE SUPPLANTED THE DIRTBAG LEFT.

- MOLLY FISCHER

HENRY WILLIAMS was 7 in 2008, and what he remembers about 2008 is that his dad lost his job. Henry’s suburban childhood was comfortable, but even so, it was shadowed by an awareness of precarity. For a time when Henry was growing up, an aunt in her 20s lived with his family while she was between jobs. The aunt had gotten an M.F.A. in film. In the years to come, an M.F.A. in film would seem like a bad plan to Henry.

When Henry Williams arrived at college, he was a stem guy: Computers were what you did to be practical. Eventually, he imagined, he might get a Ph.D. in physics. But his undergraduate career at Columbia was still young when other events intervened. Freshman year, he and a friend started a not-quite-kidding presidential campaign for former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. (They had heard about the senator on the socialist comedy podcast Chapo Trap House.) The campaign consisted primarily of a vigorous presence on dirtbag-left Twitter, where the so-called Gravel Teens gave their 89-year-old candidate’s account an unlikely fluency. The campaign did not achieve its goal of sending Gravel to the Democratic-primary debates, though it did attract mystified attention and the national press. Williams’s allegiance passed in due course to Bernie Sanders, whose campaign suffered irretrievable defeat just before covid shut down Williams’s campus. Dissatisfied with remote school and disillusioned with college in general, he decided to take a year off—from class, but not from learning.