Review

Books

Culture

Digital

Leading

11 August 2025

5 min read

How a card game, going off-grid, and a great teacher, shaped Bill Gates

A new biography explores the man who shaped the digital decades

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Bill Gates.

European Parliament, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is hard to find Bill Gates the man behind Bill Gates the tech billionaire. The founder of Microsoft is consistently portrayed in the media solely through the lens of wealth, influence and innovation, and with good reason. For decades he has ranked one of the richest men in the world with a net worth of around $113 billion, and his most recent operating system running on over 400 million devices around the world.

But in the first instalment of his planned three-volume biography Bill Gates reveals something of his personal story - of the rituals, coincidences and relationships that have shaped the man who, like it or not, is shaping all our lives

As someone who grew up riding the wave of the technological revolution of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I found Bill Gates’ deeply personal portrait particularly fascinating. But the themes of his book resonate even wider - the way he talks about relationship and risk, inclusion and inspiration, memory and morals, are poignant however much time you spend on your computer and however much money you have in your pocket.

Hearts with Grandma shaped Gates’ childhood

The powerful influence of Gates’ family, particularly his grandmother, is unmistakable. The biography opens and closes with the woman who called him “Trey,” recognizing his place as the third William Henry Gates in the family. Their close bond developed over the card table, where Gates sat in awe of her mental sharpness. Even into old age she regularly beat him at her favourite game, Hearts. It’s likely not a coincidence that this game made it into Microsoft’s early operating systems: Gates’ way of sharing something of his grandmother with the world. But Hearts was more than a card game. It symbolises the space Gates was offered to learn strategy, logic and focus. It was a levelling of the playing field across generations and an opportunity to discover and refine his sense of identity, competition and connection.

I found myself reflecting on my own childhood, and those long dark evenings playing Carrom and Rummikub with my mum, at least until I was seduced by Pacman and Elite on my microcomputer. Then I thought about how that played out with my own children who I once taught to play Uno and Connect 4 and who have subsequently introduced me to the challenges of Catan, Carcassonne, Codenames, Ganz Schon Clever, and so on. Card and table games have had their own mini-revolution since the days of Hearts and Patience: they continue to be the school where early learners develop strategy, connection, and identity.

Off-grid and online life shaped Gates’ young adult life

Gates’ childhood, as portrayed in his biography, feels like it belongs to a completely different era. It makes me feel uncomfortable as he describes the way he used to disappear as a teenager on a nine-day hike through the Cascade Mountains in Washington State with friends—no mobile phones, no contact with home. In one remarkable story, his parents managed to reach him by phoning a random stranger in a town along his route. That stranger successfully relayed the message that his family’s planned rendezvous had changed. It’s an image from a different world, one of off-grid trust, risk, and adventure—far from the always-on, hyper-connected digital culture Gates would go on to help create. How ironic that the skills Gates needed to become one of the central architects of digital transformation were formed in the middle of nowhere. The infrastructure of today’s information age—its fluidity, reach, and depth—was birthed in mountain walks, wild camping and lake swimming.

The image of a young Bill Gates forging resilience and perspective far from the digital world is both nostalgic and instructive. Perhaps the next great innovators won’t emerge from the data diet or coding camps but from tents under the stars and homes where screens are conspicuously absent.

Gates’ neurodiversity is his superpower

One of the most important influences that emerges during Gates’ school education was Mrs Blanche Caffiere, the school librarian at View Ridge Elementary in Seattle. She not only managed the library but also invited young Gates to work as her assistant—a role that empowered him, nurtured his curiosity, and profoundly shaped his sense of belonging at school. Socially awkward but intellectually gifted, Gates was given a position of responsibility, and that act of trust and inclusion gave structure to his experience of school as well as a place where he could flourish. It’s a powerful reminder of the transformative role teachers can play—especially those who go beyond the curriculum to draw out the unique gifts of each student.

In the book’s epilogue, Gates reflects on his neurodiversity:

“If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum… During my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood.”

His parents seemed to respond to his difference with patience and ingenuity. While they clearly struggled, they also invested in his education and in supporting his mental health. Instead of framing neurodiversity as a deficit, Gates’ family recognised it as a form of untapped potential. And, on reflection, Gates agrees. Seeing the world differently, he has said, is something he wouldn’t trade.

These three themes come together in one story that really struck home to me. As a child Bill Gates attended church with his sister, and on one occasion this church issued a challenge: any young person who could memorize the entire Sermon on the Mount would earn a meal at the city’s iconic Space Needle in its lofty rotating restaurant. With his agile brain, his family relationships and his growing resilience Gates memorized the entire passage verbatim, passed the test, and earned his reward.

Memorising 150 verses is no mean feat, but it wasn’t the end of the story. That challenge sparked a deeper interest, and Gates went on to read the entire Bible from cover to cover. He recognized that discovery as a vital part of his journey toward adulthood, forming part of the moral and intellectual foundation that would shape his later life.

Gate’s story, as told in this first volume, isn’t just a biography of a tech mogul - it is a window into the formation of a complex human being. What emerges is not just a tale of one success, but a testament to the quiet, often overlooked forces that shape a life, a community, and a moral framework. The time spent with a grandmother, the vision of a school librarian, the stillness of a night spent under the stars, the power of a sacred text: perhaps here is the true source of the man who is Bill Gates.

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Article

Belief

Books

Culture

Morality

21 July 2025

5 min read

Jane Austen’s satire helped her survive a dark culture

Amid folly and frailty, she allowed her characters the possibility of forgiveness

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Juliet Stevenson stars in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.

BBC.

Do Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines really get the happy endings they deserve? Not exactly, argues writer and journalist Julia Yost in her recent essay, Jane Austen’s Darkness (Wiseblood Books, 2024).

Far from an escapist Regency fantasy, Yost paints Austen’s world as one ruled by mediocrity and hatred. While believing that ‘Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness’, an institution where goodness can put up a fight against moral bankruptcy, Yost also ultimately argues that none of Austen’s heroines, with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice, manage to triumph over society’s corruption.

Most Austen readers will be able to recite a list of her villains: Mr. Wickham, Mr. Willoughby, Henry Crawford… but Yost goes beyond this, pointing out that certain universal social malaises – greed, unregulated anger, lack of charity – infect even the supposedly nobler characters in Austen’s novels. For example, Yost interprets Emma Woodhouse’s mocking of Miss Bates, Highbury’s verbally incontinent spinster, not as a sign of immaturity, but as an expression of ‘contempt’ for a social inferior. Another character in Emma, Frank Churchill, is not simply a foolish young man trying to hide an engagement to one woman by flirting with another; he actively ‘enjoys toying with Emma’, and even ‘enjoys torturing Jane [Fairfax]’, his secret fiancée, by spending time with Emma in public. Eleanor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility’s calm and collected heroine, is guilty of moral compromise by marrying the undeserving Edward Ferrars. Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father in Pride and Prejudice, is an unreformed misanthrope. Vice runs rampant in Yost’s reading of Austen’s novels.

Not even the truly admirable men and women of Austen’s stories are spared from suffering entirely. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth marry under the threat of the soon-to-be-resumed Napoleonic Wars. In Pride and Prejudice, the Darcys’ marital happiness, we are told in the final chapter, is not quite enough to spread moral betterment among their family and friends: Elizabeth’s sister Kitty improves greatly, but Lady Catherine de Bourgh remains arrogant, Mr. Wickham retains his rakishness, and Lydia stays just as thoughtless.

For Yost, showing this universal moral malady does not weaken but rather strengthens the novels’ moral gravity. ‘Austen’s satire is salubrious’, she writes, and agreeing with the Austen scholar D.W. Harding, who, in his 1940 essay ‘Regulated Hatred’, argued that laughing at vice is a ‘means for unobtrusive spiritual survival’ amidst social and natural evils. Austen’s biting condemnation, in other words, is the only way to dispel the power of human vices.

As I was reading Jane Austen’s Darkness, I found myself agreeing with many of Yost’s observations. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade writing about why Jane Austen’s satirical tone serves to make us, the readers, more aware of our failings, so Yost finds a natural ally in me.

Despite this, I was left feeling that something was missing. There’s a dimension of forgiveness to Austen’s narrative pattern that remains largely unspoken. To be fair to Yost, that’s not the focus of the essay. And yet, I’d be remiss not to mention that, in Austen’s novels, we can’t speak of condemnation without also speaking of repentance.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness.

For every example of moral failure in an Austen novel, a corresponding example of true remorse can be found. Austen tells us that, after the incident where Emma mocks Miss Bates publicly, she experiences a mixture of ‘anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern’. ‘Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life’, we’re further told, ‘She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying’. Emma’s shame pushes her to admit her mistakes to herself. Something similar happens to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, when she realises how blind she has been to Mr. Darcy’s goodness and Mr. Wickham’s deception. Similarly, Yost is right that Mr. Bennet’s misanthropy ‘disables him as a moral actor’, but after his daughter Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham, he begins to feel the force of guilt, knowing that this might have been prevented, had he been more involved in his own children’s upbringing. And if Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is passive at the risk of ceasing to be a moral agent altogether, she more than makes up for it when she sternly refuses to marry the rakish Henry Crawford, a man she neither respects nor loves.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness. As the late philosopher and Austen devotee Alasdair Macintyre argued in After Virtue (1981), all of Austen’s heroines experience a moment when they recognise their own failings, and this newly acquired virtue of ‘self-knowledge’ allows them to repent and more consciously act as moral agents in the world.

In turn, these true acts of repentance open up the way to mutual forgiveness. After marrying Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, who’d claimed that he couldn’t easily ‘forget the follies and vices of others’ agrees to reconcile with his aunt Lady Catherine, welcomes Lydia into his house, and even continues to financially support Mr. Wickham for Lydia’s sake. In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth eventually forgives Lady Russell for the role she played in ending his first engagement to Anne Elliot. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood forgives Mr. Willoughby for abandoning her sister Marianne after he confesses how much he regrets his actions.

Even when granted to someone we may consider undeserving, this central act of forgiveness heals broken social bonds. Perhaps, it’s even more healing than the ‘salubrious’ effect of Austen’s biting satire. There is darkness in Austen, but there is also much light. And if her novels prove that moral corruption is ubiquitous, they also make the case that, despite our corrupted nature, we’re not unsalvageable: forgiveness and redemption are always within reach of humankind.

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