San Francisco

Balaji Srinivasan’s distrust of authority began as early as first grade, when boys less cerebral than he was would beat him up at recess for reading a book. “Literally, like, ‘Oh, look at that nerd,’ and they’d go attack you.” That was in 1986, in Plainview, N.Y., an undistinguished Long Island hamlet where his parents, immigrants from South India, worked as physicians. “Being the only brown kid among hundreds of people, lots of kids would gang up on you and call you ‘Gandhi,’ and you could say, ‘It’s not an...