Two paths to Harvard dramatize unequal starting conditions

Ted Kaczynski, gifted and intensely nurtured in a mid-century Midwestern family valuing accomplishment, and Roland Fryer, raised amid family instability, incarceration, and drug dealing, both reached Harvard—the former as a student who went disastrously wrong, the latter as a professor—dramatizing how complex and unpredictable life outcomes are despite vastly different starting conditions.