The communist looked very pleased with himself — for being a communist and for being hit by Alex. It was exasperating. Alex had been within feet of me and I hadn’t known it until he’d hit a communist...
The UFO community? I said. Why would government spies want to infiltrate that? Oh, Jon, said Steven. Don’t be naive.
The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically d...
That’s what I Am a Strange Loop is about, said Deborah. It’s about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.
One man was saying, ‘It cost me a new SUV for my wife,’ Andrew said. Another said, ‘It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.’ Everyone was laughing.
Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. —DAVID ROSENHAN,
Normal people definitely didn’t feel this panicky. Normal people definitely didn’t feel like they were being electrocuted from the inside by an unborn child armed with a miniature Taser, that they wer...
Maybe – as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me – they’re turning social media into ‘a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the sam...
I’m like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion.
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. I
If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn’t quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Sub...
I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body...
How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We’re not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life. I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at e...
His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.
He had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn't kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.
He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success. It
Guy fell silent again. And then he said—and his voice sounded sorrowful and distressed—Last week I killed my hamster. Just by staring at it? I asked. Yes, confirmed Guy.
Given all of this, you’d think LeBon’s work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more tha...