Palmer Rampell received his PhD in English in 2017 from Yale University, where he wrote a dissertation on genre fiction and privacy in 20th-century America. He will be a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the fall.
In “USS Callister,” a much-discussed episode of Black Mirror, a reticent computer programmer collects DNA around his office from discarded objects like lollipops and coffee cups. He uses that DNA to ...