For Immediate Release: May 11, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255

THE INNOVATORS ISSUE

Marc Andreessen’s Plan to Win the Future

In the May 18, 2015, issue of , in “Tomorrow’s Advance Man” (p. 58),Tad Friend, through a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen, those closest to him, and ’s biggest names, profiles the entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture-capital firm . Two decades ago, Andreessen was the animating spirit of , the that launched the Internet boom. “In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man,” Friend writes. “But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He’s an evangelist for the church of tech- nology, afire to reorder life as we know it.” Since Andreessen Horowitz—often referred to by its alphanumeric URL, a16z—was launched, six years ago, it has vaulted into the top echelon of venture concerns. Friend goes behind the closed doors of funding negotiations, and ob- serves the decision-making between Andreessen and business partner , the co-founder of a16z. “If you say to Marc, ‘Don’t bite somebody’s fucking head off!,’ that would be wrong,” Horowitz tells Friend. “Because a lot of his value, when you’re making giant de- cisions for huge amounts of money, is saying, ‘Why aren’t you fucking considering this and this and this?’ ” Andreessen may be intellectu- ally aggressive, but he is also energetic and decisive, which makes him a valued counsellor. In an interview with Friend, discussed how, in 2006, Andreessen vehemently urged him not to sell FB—which today is valued at two hundred and eighteen billion dollars—to Yahoo! for a billion dollars. “Marc has this really deep belief that when companies are executing well on their vision they can have a much bigger effect on the world than people think, not just as a business but as a steward of humanity—if they have the time to execute,” Zuckerberg says. Andreessen’s detractors suggest he is among those pouring too much money into uncertain technology. But Andreessen contends that the dot-com crash of 2000 was an isolated event, and has led the way for a sustained boom. “Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys?” Andreessen says. “Obviously, yes. Over the past thirty years, the level of income through- out the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And it’ll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism—it’s the Eden-collapse myth over and over again—and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it’s up and to the right. If this is collapse, let’s have more of it!”

Karl Deisseroth and the Optogenetics Breakthrough

In “Lighting the Brain” (p. 75), John Colapinto explores the work of Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist in the bioengi- neering department at Stanford University, who developed optogenetics—a light-based tech- nology that has given researchers unprecedented access to the workings of the brain. Optogenet- ics renders individual, highly specific brain cells photosensitive and then activates those cells using flashes of light delivered through a fibre-optic wire. Today, scientists around the world are using the method to investigate some of the most stubborn riddles of neuroscience, including the fun- damental question of how the physical brain—the nearly hundred billion neurons and their mul- titudinous connections—gives rise to the mind: thought, mood, behavior, emotion. Deisseroth, one of the rare neuroscientists who are also practicing psychiatrists, has made mental illness a major focus of his optogenetic research. “A cardiologist can explain a damaged heart muscle to a patient,” Deisseroth, who has a dedicated research facility in the hills of Palo Alto, , tells Colapinto. “With depression, you cannot say what it really is. People can give drugs of different kinds, put electrodes in and stimulate different parts of the brain and see changed behavior—but there is no tissue-level understanding.” He added, “That problem has framed everything. How do we build the tools to keep the tissue intact but let us see and control what’s going on?” Deis- seroth hopes that his research—which is currently conducted on rodents—will help lead to med- ications that are tailored to eliminate specific symptoms of depression, with an exactitude not previously possible. And Deisseroth has received research grants aimed at applying optogenetics as a therapy tool for human patients, though he warns that that prospect faces considerable hur- dles. Some clinicians are already looking at possible treatments in the peripheral nervous sys- tem—the nerves that go to the arms and legs. “If you could turn down the pain fibres without BRUCE MCCALL affecting movement or the normal sensations, then we’d have a big impact,” he says.

Creating a Full-Scale Digital Cosmos

In “World Without End” (p. 48), Raffi Khatchadourian takes a behind-the-scenes look at the forthcoming video game No Man’s Sky, which, once finished, will allow virtual travellers to explore a galaxy containing eighteen quintillion unique planets. “The universe is being built in an old two-story building, in the town of Guildford, half an hour by train from London,” Khatchadourian writes. There, a team of roughly twelve from Hello Games sits at computer terminals, manipulating lines of code to create mathematical rules that will deter- mine the age and arrangement of virtual stars, the clustering of asteroid belts and moons and planets, the physics of gravity, the arc of or- bits, and the density and composition of atmospheres. “Because the designers are building their universe by establishing its laws of nature, rather than by hand-crafting its details, much about it remains unknown, even to them,” Khatchadourian writes. They are scheduled to finish at the end of this year; at that time, with the help of Sony—which is distributing the game—they will invite millions of people to explore their creation. Hoping to preserve a sense of discovery in the game, its chief architect, Sean Murray, has been elusive about how it will play. He shared details with Khatchadourian—who himself played an early version of it. Every player will begin on a randomly cho- sen planet at the outer perimeter of a galaxy; the goal is “to head toward the center, to uncover a fundamental mystery, but how players do that, or even whether they choose to do so, is open to them,” Khatchadourian writes. “People can mine, trade, fight, or merely explore.” As planets are discovered, information about them is loaded onto a galactic map that is updated through the Internet. But, because of the game’s near-limitless proportions, players will rarely encounter one another by chance. “As they move toward the center, the game will get harder, and the worlds—the terrain, the fauna and flora—will become more alien, more surreal,” Khatchadourian writes. He later adds: “Because of No Man’s Sky’s algorithmic structure—with every pixel rendered on the fly—the topography would not be known until the moment of encounter.” Frank Lantz, the director of New York University’s Game Center, tells Khatchadourian,“One thing a lot of video games are missing is a very confident sense of style.” He continues: “No Man’s Sky has a personality.”

The Novelist Nell Zink Never Wanted an Audience. It Found Her Anyway

In “Outside In” (p. 40), Kathryn Schulz profiles the eccentric writer Nell Zink, who wrote her début novel—“The Wallcreeper,” which came out last year, when Zink was fifty—chiefly as a provocation to the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Zink grew up in the U.S., but has lived in Germany for years. Her second book, “Mislaid,” which will be published this month, takes place in Virginia in the nineteen-sixties and seventies and tells the story of a young white lesbian faculty wife who leaves her gay professor husband and, with her daughter, adopts an African-American identity. “White writers seldom laugh about race—or, for that matter, write about it,” Schulz writes. “Mislaid”—intel- ligent, humorous, and strange, is a rarity on at least two fronts: “the shortage of smart new novels about race has nothing on the shortage of genuinely funny literary fiction.” The story of how Zink came to be published is equally rare. She began a correspondence with Franzen after he published an article in this magazine about the illegal hunting of songbirds in the Mediterranean. Zink, a devout bird lover, reached out to him regarding the plight of birds in the western Balkans. She proved to be an enthusiastic pen pal. “Every e-mail was so vivid,” Franzen says. “She is somebody who could make a three-hundred-word account of going to the grocery store for milk an interesting story. It was just evident that she was this naturally fantastic writer.” Simultaneously alarmed by the e-mail deluge and impressed by the prose, he encouraged Zink to find a wider audience. “I said, ‘Maybe you should try writing fiction,’ ” Franzen tells Schulz. “And she said, ‘Oh, I’ve done that.’ ” As Schulz details, Zink was, for a very long time, an outsider: unknown, unpublished, living deliberately far from the main- stream and looking at it with the sharply angled vision that such a position affords. “But, with the enthusiastic reception of ‘The Wall- creeper’ and the publication of ‘Mislaid’ by a mainstream press, Zink has migrated to the inside,” Schulz writes. “At a time when Ameri- can literati are debating whether writers are better served by living in New York City or getting an .F.A., such migrations, from so remote a starting point, are far from the norm.” How Zink accomplished hers, halfway through her life and from half a world away, is a story nearly as improbable as anything in her latest novel.

Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson examines the recent threats to Texas, both real—the violent attack on the “Draw Muhammad” con- test—and, in the case of the Jade Helm Map, perceived (p. 33); in the Financial Page, James Surowiecki examines why today’s algorithmic market is so vulnerable (p. 37); in Shouts and Murmurs, Colin Nissan imagines a darkly funny exchange between two mothers trapped in Playground Purgatory (p. 46); Anwen Crawford listens to Shamir’s début album, “Ratchet” (p. 90); Malcolm Gladwell reviews Edward Follis’s memoir, “The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Narco-Terrorism” (p. 93); Joshua Rothman reads “Do No Harm,” the memoir of a British neurosurgeon (p. 98); Anthony Lane watches “Good Kill” and “Slow West” (p. 102); and fiction byJustin Taylor (p. 84).

Online: On this week’s Out Loud podcast, Michael Schulman and Alex Barron discuss the state of Broadway with Amelia Lester and David Haglund; on the Political Scene, Dorothy Wickenden speaks with Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy about whether the American populace is leaning to the left.

Tablet and Phone Extras: A video of in-game footage from No Man’s Sky, with commentary by Raffi Khatchadourian; Justin Taylor reads his short story; poetry readings by Mónica de la Torre and Sharon Olds; and Richard Brody picks his Movie of the Week, Floyd Mutrux’s “Aloha, Bobby and Rose,” from 1975.

The May 18, 2015, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, May 11th.