One day in June, the better part of the U.S. Olympic rowing program flew to London for the Henley Royal Regatta in a sudden alpha-male rapture that left behind only the very young, the injured—and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

The identical twins believe that they are the rightful founders of Facebook, and in seven years of litigating to this effect have fused America’s fascinations with courtroom drama, Wasp culture, and genetic novelty to make themselves an object of cultural wonder, the Winklevii, multi-media contortionists who might feud with a former Treasury secretary (Larry Summers, while president of Harvard, declined their request to punish the undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg and recently called them assholes in a public forum), then join with Snooki, a fellow late-imperial oddity, in the pitching of pistachios online, before appearing as a $1,600 question on Jeopardy! (“Last name of twins seen here? They put their oars in the water for Oxford as well as Harvard . . . ”)—all in the same six-month period.

The brothers sat in sloppy lotus positions beneath a network of domed surveillance cameras, in a plastic-polymer Quonset hut in the scrubby desert, working through a series of performance-enhancing yogic visualizations with the sandy-blond, Jesus-bearded Jake Cornelius.

“Let’s do some breathing first,” said Cornelius, who has written on his blog about the often uncontrollable rage and anger that led him to embrace rowing as an emotional outlet. “Let’s all just count, like, 10 breaths.”

Cameron and Tyler sat with legs crossed, wrists upturned, identical Buddhas breathing in and out, in and out, in and out . . .

“We’re gonna sit here and breathe a little bit. As you get ready to do these weights, think about the best race you ever had. Think about how it felt to win. Think about what it was like to come to the dock afterwards. Think about what the coach said. Try to bottle that feeling up.”

It seemed like they might float up past the Olympic banners, then through one of the surveillance cameras into heaven’s rented portion of an air-conditioned server-maintenance facility just outside Palo Alto.

“Now think about the worst race you ever had, and how shitty it felt to lose.”

Tyler’s face tightened against the memory of failure. “Now let’s go do some weights,” said Jake Cornelius, “and never feel that way again.”

Late American Nobility

The Winklevosses have been living and training in the California border town of Chula Vista since last December. It is a sputtering neon error of beauty academies and pawnshops, recently terrorized by a homicidal Tijuana drug gang skilled at dissolving bodies in chemicals.

It was here, in 1989, before the housing bubble burst and Mexicans were festooning highways with one another’s severed heads, that a group of businessmen arranged to build the U.S. Olympic Committee a $65 million training center on 150 acres of land donated by the EastLake Development Company, a local homebuilder—a facility where athletes could pursue the Athenian ideal year-round, presumably to the benefit of area property values.

The night before I flew out from New York, the twins announced that they were abandoning their plan to petition the Supreme Court to break from matters of constitutional import to please get them more money from Facebook.

The response of the anonymous commentariat was joyous and unforgiving: “Maybe the Winklevii started to notice that instead of just being privileged egoists they had become an international joke,” wrote one commenter on a New York Times blog. “Perhaps they should run back to the cover of anonymity before their family name is forever sullied ... whoops too late.”