A History of Wasted People

The stories of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing have often made me think, made me angry, made me sad. It is not just the human tragedy and the suffering they and those who loved them endured, but the enormous intellectual loss to humanity. In each generation there are only a small number of people who really make a difference. I struggle with the fact that our societies cut short the lives and careers of some of those people for reasons that just…