At First, I Did Stories On People

As I Glanced At The Phraseology Of The Research Report, Dull And Unfathomable To Outsiders Like Me, I Thought That If You Have The Ambition To Become A Villain, The First Thing You Should Do Is Learn To Be Impenetrable. Don’t Act Like Blofeld—monocled And Ostentatious. We Journalists Love Writing About Eccentrics. We Hate Writing About Impenetrable, Boring People. It Makes Us Look Bad: The Duller The Interviewee, The Duller The Prose. If You Want To Get Away With Wielding True, Malevolent Power, Be Boring.

We Want To See Ourselves As Curious And Open-minded And Smart And Understanding Things In Terms Of Context And Nuance, But When Someone Tries To Do That In The Midst Of A Shaming They're Turned On.

Well, I Had Nightmares When I Was Doing The Klan Story All The Time. I Had A Recurring Nightmare Of Basically Being Exposed As A Jew Inside The Klan Compound.

It Is An Awful Lot Harder, Tony Told Me, To Convince People You're Sane Than It Is To Convince Them You're Crazy.

At The End Of Our Conversation She (martha Stout) Turned To Address You, The Reader. She Said If You're Beginning To Feel Worried That You May Be A Psychopath, If You Recognize Some Of Those Traits In Yourself, If You're Feeling A Creeping Anxiety About It, That Means You Are Not One.