And, sure enough, remarkable Lucinda had been right that Lipkin was using Eichmann as a segue into the famous Milgram experiment about following orders that had been conducted at Yale in 1961, a few weeks after the Nazi SS-man, who had been hiding out for ten years in balmy Argentina, was kidnapped by the agents of the Mossad and smuggled back to Jerusalem to go on trial for his enthusiasm and efficiency in loading Europe’s Jews into trains.
“I think,” Cass whispered back to Lucinda, “that Lipkin’s performing his own psychological torture on us.”
Cass was perhaps getting just a bit punch-drunk. This gibe fell a little flat and, if you thought about it, didn’t really make that much sense.
“It’s amazing, the sputum that passes for science in these parts,” Lucinda responded. This witticism was all the wittier given that Lipkin was a spitter, but it had made Cass’s grin go a little shaky around the corners, since it touched a sore spot. Did Lucinda know what his own specialty was? Was she aiming a gibe at him as well? Given her camaraderie, it was hard to believe, but his experience had been that those occupying the more technical reaches of the field could be pretty dismissive of people like him. Sebastian Held, for example, who was a Mandelbaum wannabe, was downright rude. Did the enchantress beside him have similar tendencies? There was nobody who went further in the direction of the technical than Lucinda Mandelbaum.
Her first book, Mathematical Foundations of Game Theory with Applications to the Behavioral Sciences, based on her doctoral dissertation, had formulated the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, and she had been trailblazing ever since. After receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford, she had spent the next three years at Harvard’s dauntingly elite Society of Fellows, had garnered the Distinguished Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Troland Award in cognitive psychology from the National Academy of Sciences, awarded to an under-forty scientist.
By the time Lucinda went on the job market, post-Society, she received offers from every top department in the world that had an opening, which had been her goal. She had accepted Princeton’s offer. All the other job candidates in the field that year who got hired elsewhere were aware that they were employed only because Lucinda Mandelbaum hadn’t wanted their jobs. That was three years ago, and her productivity had not suffered since. Only last year,
