Like many of my fellow writers, journalists, and music lovers, I spent many hours on the phone or emailing with Steve Silberman, the acclaimed science writer, passionate Grateful Dead and David Crosby fan, and all-around mensch who died of natural causes on Aug. 28 at age 66. His husband, Keith Karraker, announced the news online.
But one of my conversations with Silberman stands out.
It was the fall of 2016, days after Donald Trump was, unbelievably, going to be our next president. Silberman already had it on his calendars to talk with me that day about Crosby (and the history of CSNY) for a book I was writing about them. From the start, you could tell that Silberman, raised by left-leaning teachers in New York, was distraught and flummoxed by the election results. As the phrase goes, he was in a tizzy. But in that moment, we chose not to dwell on it too much. Instead, I congratulated him on the reception to his pioneering best-selling book on the autism community, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.
But soon we were caught up in music talk, with Silberman explaining how he discovered CSNY music (in particular Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name) when he was a teenager; then we dove deep into the group’s legend, myth, and gossip. I can’t speak for Silberman — and he might have thought this was a corny way to put it — but the conversation was a reminder of the healing power of music.
The wide range of that chat also demonstrates the breath of Silberman’s knowledge and passions and the all-encompassing legacy he left behind. Some may know him from NeuroTribes, a deeply researched and also fiercely opinionated work. Other may be familiar with him from his writings for Wired and his work on the early days of the Internet and its online gathering place, the WELL. If you’re a Deadhead you recognize his name from liner notes to Dead albums, his co-production credit on the box set So Many Roads, or Skeleton Key, the Dead “dictionary” he co-wrote with David Shenk.
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Then again, you may know him from his scathing, must-read (and must-retweet) social-media posts about politics and the state of the country and the Republican Party. “Aw, *so cute*!” he wrote this summer accompanying a photo of a less-than-full rally by the GOP candidate he loathed so much. “Trump’s rally in Asheville tonight is like a miniature doll house version of one of Kamala’s rallies. Don’t worry, big guy. They’ll love you in the prison chow line.”
As he once wrote, “I was a suburban kid, the son of agnostic parents who believed in a healing of the world by political, rather than spiritual, means.”
What connected his many interests was his affinity for underdogs and the misrepresented, whether it was the neurodivergent community, the gay community to which he proudly belonged, and, in a way, Deadheads. From the start, Silberman was, he once said, “raised to be sensitive to the plight of the oppressed.” As he said in one interview, “I am not equating homosexuality and autism — autism is inherently disabling in ways that homosexuality is not — but I think that’s why I was sensitive to the feelings of a group of people who were systematically bullied, tortured and thrown into asylums.”
Music, philosophy, poetry, and literature all found a way into his head and heart. Silberman’s background included studying psychology at Ohio’s Oberlin College; working as Allen Ginsberg’s teaching assistant at the Naropa Institute in Colorado; and getting a master’s in English literature at UC Berkeley. He wound up in San Francisco, where he began writing about technology, science, the burgeoning Internet, and the Dead, and became a longtime contributor to Wired.
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Silberman discovered the Dead and CSNY during his teen years, and both rock institutions became a soundtrack to his life. He had a unique bond with Crosby, which started when a young Silberman saw him in concert in 1973 in New Jersey. From that point, and hearing “Laughing” on If I Could Only Remember My Name, Silberman became a true believer in Crosby’s artistic aspirations and weirdness (Silberman also had a strong affinity for jazz and experimental music). “I felt like David was my guy,” he told me years ago. “I would travel hundreds of miles to see his concert.” He would talk about hitching all the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to see a Crosby and Nash show in 1976. A true Croz believer, Silberman felt his musical hero was doing some of his best work in his later years and, contrary to perceived wisdom, didn’t need CSNY anymore. Silberman and Crosby eventually became close friends and confidants, and Silberman was expectedly distraught when Crosby died in 2023, just a few years after Silberman lost his mother.
I first met Silberman, by phone, 16 years ago when I was doing a story for Rolling Stone on the reunion of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead for a Barack Obama benefit. Even though we’d never met, he was immediately helpful, friendly, and chatty, with an endearing belly laugh. His love of that music and its importance in the culture (and his love of a good Dead tea) couldn’t have been more evident. From then on we stayed in regular touch, talking about CSNY and the Dead as well as about the challenges of elder care as we both dealt with ailing parents. And he loved to debate, especially about music. He recently gave me shit online for maintaining that Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus was actually better than its reputation. I laughed at his retort and we continued our interactions — but never spoke of that album again.
Silberman also did some of his best non-science writing on the Dead, whether it was an exploration of their under-reported gay fan base, the importance of the “Drums” section of their concerts (how it signified both breakdown and renewal), and the world itself. “If Deadheads were a tribe that sought collective experience, we were also an aggregation of loners who had learned how not to bruise each other’s solitude: that place where our souls, and the music, communed,” he wrote in 1995. “If you were tripping, the music would pour forth celestial architectures, quicksilver glistening with might-be’s, cities of light at the edge of a sea of chaos, monumental forms that could be partially recollected in tranquility, and turned into designs in fabric or clay, golden sentences, streams of bits. And some nights, the hair on the back of your neck would stand on end as a presence came into the room, given a body by the magnificent sound system.”
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At the time of his death, Silberman was working on a new book, The Taste of Salt, which he described as a chronicle of “the human stories behind one of the most impressive, but little-known, medical successes of our time: the transformation of cystic fibrosis from an inevitably fatal childhood disease to a chronic and manageable condition of adulthood.” It’s doubly tragic that he left us just as a new wave of optimism arose in the political arena that had caused him, and many of us, so much angst. “Say what you will about joy not being a strategy,” he posted during this month’s Democratic National convention, “but we’re all going to live a little longer after the DNC vaccine against despair.” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also not a Silberman fan, and Steve loved that too.)
But let’s leave the last word for Silberman himself. “When I die, please don’t say that I’ve crossed over into the spirit realm, gone to the Other Side, moved on to a better place, rejoined my ancestors, or any other of those comforting fables,” he posted recently. “Just selfishly or selflessly use my own impermanence to wake up to your own.”
