There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people.
The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation, he told Bob’s researcher. I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was...
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the...
The consensus from the beginning was that only 1 percent of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually remold society, remold it all wrong,
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...
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...
Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.
Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.
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 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...
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...
Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories
Feedback is an engineering principle, Adam's email to me ended. 'And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.
Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there . . . T...