What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.
Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What i...
A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re pe...
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...
The word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, 'No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We don'...
A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it’s an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be...
I didn't realize he was a drunk driver,' I said. 'The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still' - I indicate the nearby crack dealer...
I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She wa...
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal.
He hosted a series of lunches – Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon – for politicians and prominent society people. He’d sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said som...
[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a m...
It felt like a vast left-wing conspiracy to pretend to have found Eric André’s performance funny. This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack — fanning the fla...
There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking ma...
When I was writing my biography of LeBon, Bob Nye told me, he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.
Our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of...
These depictions of a broken America were also highly selective. When Ted Cruz listed the various ways Americans have had their lives destroyed — by terrorists, or police officers cut down in the line...
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 wi...
I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is The Internet is about you. We like to think of ourselves as people who have c...
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