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Yes, the show was sexier, faster-paced, and more idealistic than Washington really is, but what’s wrong with that? We should aspire to do big and ambitious and idealistic things in this country—even if it takes longer than one hour, or one season.” The West Wing, he says, “was idealistic and so were we. Everyone hoped politics would be like that.

He says he learned later that someone at the casino had called the manager, who was in London, and told him that Don Johnson was ahead of them “by four.”

“Four hundred thousand?” the manager asked.

“No, 4 million.”

It’s worth pausing to recall that we have yet to make even one person immortal. Instead, we have made dying a lot harder than it has to be. In the course of a progressive illness, there almost always comes a point when more treatment is not better care.

“Let’s say I am giving directions for how to leave this room,” he says, gesturing to the white-walled, white-boarded Google office around him […]

“In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’ ”

“The programmer is abstracted from controlling the minutiae in the computer,” he notes. Sometimes, that might be a bad thing. Lower-level languages allow the programmer to manipulate the computer with more-precise instructions, for instance.

But in developing for the Web, such succinctness, when well designed, is often invaluable to a hacker since it lets her code so much faster.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé

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In conference rooms in the glossily renovated United Building in downtown Chicago and in United’s offices in the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower a few blocks away, Continental employees transplanted from Houston are working alongside their new United colleagues, spending months debating questions such as whether to board flights back to front, as most airlines do, or window, middle, then aisle, as legacy United did; whether miniature ponies will be allowed, as they were on Continental, to travel in the cabin as service animals (they will); whether Jet Skis are allowed as baggage (no); what information to print on the boarding pass; what direction dog crates should face when loaded into the cargo hold (backwards, as at legacy United, so spooked dogs don’t recoil and tip the crate off the conveyor belt); whether to require baggage handlers to wear steel-toed shoes (no official decision yet); what shape the plastic cups for cold beverages should be (wider than the old United cups but skinnier than the old Continental ones); whether unaccompanied minors should be identified by a bracelet or a button (bracelet); whether to have a first-class cabin like United or just business class like Continental (the former); and whether, in the first-class cabin, to serve nuts in a bag or heated in a ramekin (ramekin).

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