May 22, 1942

Chicago, Illinois

The Unabomber

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race… . The continued development of technology will … certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world."

On April 3, 1996, a team of heavily armed federal agents arrested a man outside his one-room cabin in a Montana forest. The arrest ended a seventeen-year hunt for a terrorist known as the Unabomber, who had killed three people with a series of mail bombs. His name was Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard graduate who had a Ph.D. in mathematics and once taught at the University of California in Berkeley.

A psychiatrist concluded that Kaczynski suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that seriously distorted his sense of reality and drove him to a lonely life in the...