Five years ago this week, a relatively obscure Stanford law professor named Barbara Fried hit send on an email that would transform her life. The subject line: “Proposed meeting on election project.” At the time, Fried was merely a curious and concerned academic, a polymath from a family of ubermensch intellectuals known for following their academic passions in a manner that seemed to almost parody a Saul Bellow novel or Woody Allen film. Fried’s husband, Joe Bankman, was a fellow Stanford law professor who had gone back to school midcareer to become a clinical psychologist who specialized in helping students manage their law school pressures. The couple’s eldest son, Sam Bankman-Fried, had graduated from M.I.T. and landed a job at the cutthroat hedge fund, Jane Street Capital, before founding some relatively obscure cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong. Barbara, for her part, occasionally moonlighted from her academic career to write fiction. Now she was at it again with a new obsession: politics.