Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

It’s strange, how life can sometimes mimic literature. Consider the story of Jonathan Keeperman, which in crucial ways recalls American Pastoral. Like Philip Roth’s novel, it is a story of how mad ideas can take hold when history unsettles familiar normative coordinates, and when children confront a more dimly lit world than the one faced by their fathers. Even some of the basic details are reminiscent of American Pastoral. Jonathan Keeperman’s father, Fred, came into the world in 1948 at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Hospital and spent his early years in Brownsville. The family-owned a candy store on Pitkin Avenue, and soon Fred was immersed in the “colorful cast of characters who inhabited the immigrant Jewish community into which he was born,” as his obituary put it. (He died two years ago.)  The family moved to the eminently Rothian town of Metuchen, New Jersey. Fred joined his high school’s varsity wrestling team, and this in turn won him an athletic scholarship to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. There he met his future wife, Rita, a Galesburg local and Catholic-school grad “who taught Fred how to bale hay and put a cow back in the barn,” per the obit. After graduating college, Fred became first a special-ed teacher and then a junior-high vice principal.  In 1976, ambition beckoned him to the Bay Area. He went into business with his uncle and finished an evening law degree. Eventually, the family made its forever home in a cul-de-sac in Moraga, a lush, quiet suburb of San Francisco. Fred ran his own small law office, where Rita would serve as the business manager. On the side, he coached sports and led the local education foundation and baseball association, among other civic groups. Fred and Rita Keeperman, in short, enjoyed a full measure of the stability and