Valley of the Gods

Valley of the Gods

1



Asperger's Chic

John Burnham wanted to mine asteroids. He had always been a little bit different. Instead of reading school textbooks or his summer reading list, he read Plato, Aristotle, and a modern-day "neoreactionary" thinker who goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug. A self-declared libertarian and "self-directed learner," motivated to study on his own, Burnham felt like he didn't need teachers to tell him what to do. He was a terribly behaved student.

By the spring semester of his senior year of high school in 2011, John had been rejected or wait-listed from all ten colleges he applied to except the University of Massachusetts, just over ten miles away from where he lived in Newton, Massachusetts. He didn't really care, though, since the idea of enduring another four years of dull lectures and drearier tests was less than appealing. It was a distraction from what he had always wanted to do, which was to go into space-and reap trillions of dollars from the valuable minerals that existed in asteroids.

Burnham wasn't delusional. He knew what he was talking about. While most of his classmates read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Great Gatsby, he was researching nickel, cobalt, and platinum on S-type (silacaceous) asteroids. With bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a seemingly permanent smirk, he was popular with girls and distracted himself with brief high school flirtations, but John still had plenty of time for his loftier interests. As he procrastinated doing the homework assignments he found pointless, he scoured the Web, stumbling across bloggers whose ideas were at least more interesting than those of his current teachers.

His favorite was called Unqualified Reservations, written by the reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Yarvin. An engineer living in Silicon Valley, Yarvin described himself in his blog's "About Me" section with the words "stubbornness and disrespect." Burnham was

Alexandra Wolfe is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly column "Weekend Confidential." After graduating from Duke University, she worked as a staff reporter for the New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and then Condé Nast Portfolio. As a freelancer, she wrote regular columns for Bloomberg Businessweek, features for Travel + Leisure and Departures, and has written cover stories for Vanity Fair and Town & Country. The Valley of the Gods is her first book. She lives in New York City.