It must be understood that Arnold Ungelernter was intelligent, but not intelligent enough to have been the inventor of the Device. He acknowledged this himself. His background was unimpressive. The community college where he studied accounting was ranked low. His was the last generation to have been reared by immigrant parents in a tenement in an overpopulated Brooklyn neighborhood never destined to be gentrified. The bathtub was in the kitchen. The Albanian janitor and his family lived close to the coal bin in the cellar. And the Device, he admitted, had come into being not as his brainchild but as ...