They asked me to do this piece as part of their series on great American immigrants. (Sorry, but it looks like this is paywalled for non-subscribers; I can’t see it, at any rate.)

It was fun to write, especially to get a chance to push back on the idea of von Neumann as a space alien who humans could barely comprehend. The real guy was fully human and much more interesting. There was a part I wanted to put in about how von Neumann’s late essay “Can We Survive Technology?” has a lot in common with the introduction to the Communist Manifesto, despite von Neumann’s vigorous anti-Communism. But I ran out of room and time. Maybe later!