As the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic prompts a new wave of calls from pundits for workers to “learn to code” and further efforts by local and state governments to attract high-tech employers by any means necessary, the critical perspectives provided by historical studies of the “idea economy” are vital. In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings makes an important contribution to this burgeoning literature by surveying the emergence and growth of technologically advanced enterprise in the triangle bounded by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill in North Carolina. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, when most southern locales still focused on luring conventional manufacturing away from what would soon become the Rust Belt with promises of low-wage labor, central North Carolina pursued a different developmentalist strategy, aspiring instead to appeal to both cutting-edge firms in fields such as computing and pharmaceuticals and the highly educated workforce needed to perform complex intellectual tasks. Unlike other early hubs for advanced science and technology, such as the Route 128 corridor in the Boston suburbs or the research centers in the Bay Area that spawned Silicon Valley, which already possessed concentrations of professionals and technicians along with elite universities and amenities, North Carolina's Research Triangle Park (RTP) seemingly offered a model that could be emulated by metropolitan areas with more modest endowments of human and cultural capital. “The park's planners and boosters,” Cummings argues, “not only created a template of what an environment for intellectual labor ought to look like; they also pioneered an approach to economic development that leveraged creativity, culture, and especially universities to attract advanced industries and educated workers” (5). By the last quarter of the twentieth century, as American factories fled overseas, the founders of RTP looked increasingly prescient as the region earned an international reputation as a center for innovation.Cummings succeeds marvelously at evoking the region's visual and spatial characteristics. As she explains, the planners of RTP promulgated restrictive zoning policies to discourage manufacturing or distribution activities, while high-modernist architecture, epitomized by Paul Rudolph's recently demolished research laboratory for the Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company, defined the landscape of the idea economy. Beyond the immediate boundaries of RTP, Cummings effectively conveys a compelling sense of the metropolitan region as a cluster of differentiated yet interconnected places. She explores the establishment of Parkwood as a suburban enclave that catered to the white-collar employees of firms that moved to RTP, the evolution of Cary from a sleepy southern town on the periphery of RTP to the bucolic home of software giant SAS, and the recent gentrification of Durham from a site of deindustrialization and disinvestment to a hip urban location for upscale residence and consumption. Cummings also inserts interludes between several of the chapters that augment the book's principal narrative trajectory with personal vignettes from the region's denizens that illuminate the experiences of everyday living in the area, particularly its increasing diversity as it continues to draw newcomers from around the globe.Many readers of Labor may wish that this rich description of the making of the Research Triangle in geographical terms was complemented by an equally robust analysis of the work involved in making the region's idea economy. For all the times that we are reminded that the Triangle had a greater proportion of PhDs than any other metropolitan area in the United States, Cummings offers little explication of labor processes within particular workplaces, the region's occupational structure, or any incipient class formation. Although she acknowledges that, by one estimate, “even in high-tech companies, 65 percent of the workforce was employed in production, 30 percent in administration and management, and a mere 5 percent directly in scientific or engineering work,” this is presented almost as an aside rather than as opening into a detailed examination of the actual employment patterns within the flourishing Triangle of the late twentieth century (113). Similarly, Cummings notes at several points the exceptions that RTP granted certain firms to include production facilities, and that some pharmaceutical companies located laboratories in RTP while simultaneously constructing low-wage manufacturing plants elsewhere in North Carolina. Yet these details are generally portrayed as historical ironies, not as evidence that contravenes many of the key claims made by the Triangle's promoters and propagandists. While Cummings correctly observes that the Triangle, like nearly all metropolitan areas in the contemporary United States, is plagued by increasing inequality, Brain Magnet could demonstrate more clearly how the labor market dynamics of the idea economy have resulted in an inegalitarian distribution of the gains accruing from the region's development.The relative absence of work in a book about the creation of a place for knowledge workers reflects a deeper issue with Cummings's exploration of the idea of the idea economy. In the postwar United States, the privileging of high-tech firms and people with advanced degrees was always about more than just stimulating economic growth or raising per capita incomes. It also performed an ideological function of obfuscating capitalist class relations. The emphasis on PhDs and other comparable knowledge workers, with their autonomy and high salaries purportedly situating them beyond the realm of necessity and in the realm of freedom, and their repeated invocation to stand in for the whole of the Triangle's workforce, elided the everyday realities of toil for the overwhelming majority. Moreover, RTP was conceived not only as an expression of national discourses regarding what Daniel Bell would eventually describe as “the coming of post-industrial society,” but also in the proximate context of the aftermath of the militant interracial organizing of CIO-affiliated unions in North Carolina during the 1940s. Brain Magnet provides a welcome narrative of the Triangle's history as a region designed for intellectual endeavors, but it would be stronger if it did more to elucidate all of the labor relations inherent in the idea economy.