Sublime

One other oddly big thing happened to Sam at the beginning of his junior year. Completely out of the blue, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University named Will Crouch* reached out and asked to meet with him. Sam never learned how the guy had found him—probably from the writing Sam had been doing on various utilitarian messa

Singer’s thought experiment, which he called “the Drowning Child,” became influential within the school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. Utilitarians argue that the proper action is the one that maximizes the world’s collective well-being.

When we meet the boy for the first time, we described him as wearing a black t-shirt and sporting a wispy soul-patch on his chin. Emblematically it fit, showing his yearning to be hip and older on the inside and not quite cutting it in his appearance.

From the moment he had started on the project and begun to observe Sam from afar, Ian had found the same thought often crossing his mind: how shockingly just like he’d been in high school Sam still was. When the oddball in your high school class became one of the richest people in the world, you sort of assumed the oddball must have changed. Sam ha