James' World 2

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In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.

With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. “Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer,” he says.

Zeloof’s chip was his second. He made the first, much smaller one as a high school senior in 2018; he started making individual transistors a year before that. His chips lag Intel’s by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he’s making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore’s law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel’s breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition.

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Sam Zeloof completed this homemade computer chip with 1,200 transistors, seen under a magnifying glass, in August 2021.Photograph: Sam Kang

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In the nineteen-thirties in Budapest, a young mother struggled. “I was amazed at how difficult it was to be a parent. I was angry,” Magda Gerber wrote later. “I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what to do with babies and somehow in my education someone had forgotten to tell me.” Then, one day, she watched in astonishment as a pediatrician treated her four-year-old daughter. The doctor, a Viennese Jew named Emmi Pikler, did something unheard of she listened to her patient. Gerber was dazzled by Pikler’s insistence that her daughter could speak for herself—that even the youngest children could be enlisted in stunning feats of coöperation. “It made me feel that this was the answer to all my questions and doubts,” Gerber wrote. She devoted the rest of her life to learning from Pikler and disseminating her ideas.

Pikler argued that babies, like seeds growing into plants, did not need any teaching to develop as nature intended; they would learn to walk, speak, sleep, self-soothe, and interact perfectly if only we would get out of their way. The problem, she wrote in “Peaceful Babies—Contented Mothers,” is that “the child is seen as a toy or as a ‘doll,’ rather than a human being.” Babies are shushed when they try to communicate, clucked at like morons, tickled when they are sad, passed around like objects, and crammed into high chairs in positions their bodies aren’t ready to form. After becoming accustomed to this relentless, invasive attention, a child starts believing that she requires it. “She will, in time, become increasingly whiney and cling to adults,” Pikler cautioned. The result is a kid as desperate for attention as her parents are desperate for peace.

In 1946, the city of Budapest enlisted Pikler to set up an orphanage for children who’d lost their families to the Second World War. Pikler soon fired the nurses, who seemed unable to relinquish their authoritarian focus on efficiency, and replaced them with young women from local villages, whom she trained to treat infants with “ceremonious slowness.” Over time, Pikler codified a philosophy, built around showing babies the same respect that adults reflexively grant one another. Magda Gerber emigrated in 1957, settling in California, where she spread the message in the sunshine, with a program soberly named Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE.

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Very few people can resist smiling at a newborn baby – signaling positive emotions, such as joy and interest. Of course, this is especially true for new parents. One study found that new mothers looked at their 16-hour-old babies 80% of the time and smiled at them 34% of the time.

Sometimes newborn babies even smile back, creating a magical moment for the parents that is often ruined by someone pointing out that the smile can’t be real. Even textbooks tend to regard neonatal smiling as a reflex rather than an actual expression of joy and happiness. But is this really the case?

Up to the second half of the 20th century, the behavior of newborns was considered mostly reflexive. Scientists assumed that newborns had a limited ability to feel and express emotions, and did not have enough social experience to interact with their caregivers.

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