52 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
speech can identify you as a dissident.
Similarly, Harari has observed that, had
sophisticated artificial intelligence ex-
isted when he was younger, it might have
recognized his homosexuality long be-
fore he was ready to acknowledge it.
Such data-driven judgments don’t need
to be perfectly accurate to outperform
humans. Harari argues that, though
there’s no sure prophylac-
tic against such future in-
trusions, people who are
alert to the workings of their
minds will be better able to
protect themselves. Harari
recently told a Ukrainian
reporter, “Freedom depends
to a large extent on how
much you know yourself,
and you need to know your-
self better than, say, the gov-
ernment or the corporations that try to
manipulate you.” In this context, to think
clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and
forth—is a form of social action.
Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office,
told me that, on social media, fans of
Harari’s books tend to be “largely male,
twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is
a Harari enthusiast, but the more typ-
ical reader may be a young person grate-
ful for permission to pay more atten-
tion to his or her needs than to the needs
of others. (Not long ago, one of Hara-
ri’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your
books changed my life, Yuval. Just as in-
vesting in Tesla did.”)
Harari doesn’t dismiss more active
forms of political engagement, particu-
larly in the realm of L.G.B.T.Q. rights,
but his writing underscores the impor-
tance of equanimity. In a section of “Sa-
piens” titled “Know Thyself,” Harari de-
scribes how the serenity achieved through
meditation can be “so profound that
those who spend their lives in the fren-
zied pursuit of pleasant feelings can
hardly imagine it.” “21 Lessons” includes
extended commentary on the life of the
Buddha, who “taught that the three basic
realities of the universe are that every-
thing is constantly changing, nothing
has any enduring essence, and nothing
is completely satisfying.” Harari contin-
ues, “You can explore the furthest reaches
of the galaxy, of your body, or of your
mind, but you will never encounter some-
thing that does not change, that has an
eternal essence, and that completely
satisfies you.... ‘What should I do?’ ask
people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do
nothing. Absolutely nothing.’”H
arari didn’t learn the result of the
2016 U.S. Presidential election
until five weeks after the vote. He was
on a retreat, in England. In Vipassana
meditation, the form that Harari prac-
tices, a retreat lasts at least
ten days. He sometimes
does ten-day retreats in
Israel, in the role of a
teaching assistant. Once a
year, he goes away for a
month or longer. Partici-
pants at a Vipassana cen-
ter may talk to one another
as they arrive—while giv-
ing up their phones and
books—but thereafter
they’re expected to be silent, even while
eating with others.
I discussed meditation with Harari
one day at a restaurant in a Tel Aviv
hotel. (A young doorman recognized
him and thanked him for his writing.)
We were joined by Itzik Yahav and the
mothers of both men. Jeanette Yahav, an
accountant, has sometimes worked in
the Tel Aviv office. So, too, has Pnina
Harari, a former office administrator; she
has had the task of responding to the
e-mail pouring into Harari’s Web site:
poems, pieces of music, arguments for
the existence of God.
Harari said of the India retreats, which
take place northeast of Mumbai, “Most
of the day you’re in your own cell, the
size of this table.”
“Unbelievable,” Pnina Harari said.
During her son’s absences, she and
Yahav stay in touch. “We speak, we con-
sole each other,” she said. She also starts
a journal: “It’s like a letter to Yuval. And
the last day of the meditation I send it
to him.” Once back in Mumbai, he can
open an e-mail containing two months
of his mother’s news.
Before Itzik Yahav met Harari,
through a dating site, he had some ex-
perience of Vipassana, and for years they
practiced together. Yahav has now
stopped. “I couldn’t keep up,” he told me.
“And you’re not allowed to drink. I want
to drink with friends, a glass of wine.” I
later spoke to Yoram Yovell, a friend of
Harari’s, who is a well-known Israeli
neuroscientist and TV host. A few yearsago, Yovell signed up for a ten-day re-
treat in India. He recalled telling him-
self, “This is the first time in ten years
that you’re having a ten-day vacation,
and you’re spending it sitting on your
tush, on this little mat, inhaling and ex-
haling. And outside is India!” He lasted
twenty-four hours. (In 2018, two years
after authorities in Myanmar began a
campaign of ethnic cleansing against Ro-
hingya Muslims, Jack Dorsey completed
a ten-day Vipassana retreat in that coun-
try, and defended his visit by saying, “This
was a purely personal trip for me focused
on only one dimension: meditation.”)
At lunch, Pnina Harari recalled the
moment when Yuval’s two older sisters
reported to her that Yuval had taught
himself to read: “He was three, not more
than four.”
Yuval smiled. “I think more like four,
five.”
She described the time he wrote a
school essay, then rewrote it to make
it less sophisticated. He told her that
nobody would have understood the
first draft.
From the age of eight, Harari attended
a school for bright students, two bus rides
away from his family’s house in Kiryat
Ata. Yuval’s father, who died in 2010, was
born on a kibbutz, and maintained a life-
long skepticism about socialism; his work,
as a state-employed armaments engineer,
was classified. By the standards of the
town, the Harari household was bour-
geois and bookish.
The young Yuval had a taste for grand
designs. He has said, “I promised myself
that when I grew up I would not get
bogged down in the mundane troubles
of daily life, but would do my best to un-
derstand the big picture.” In the back
yard, he spent months digging a very
deep hole; it was never filled in, and some-
times became a pond. He built, out of
wood blocks and Formica tiles, a huge
map of Europe, on which he played war
games of his own invention. Harari told
me that during his adolescence, against
the backdrop of the first intifada, he went
through a period when he was “a kind of
stereotypical right-wing nationalist.” He
recalled his mind-set: “Israel as a nation
is the most important thing in the world.
And, obviously, we are right about every-
thing. And the whole world doesn’t un-
derstand us and hates us. So we have to
be strong and defend ourselves.” He