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....
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'...
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...
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I clos...
I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to...
Be patient and curious instead of instantly judgemental.
Wow, I say, politely, but I don't feel it. I'm like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion.
In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I’ve been seeing it everywhere.
Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there’s nobody there and the restaurant doesn’t exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-e...
The world in which Alex is a leading voice — a loose collection of internet conspiracy theorists and nationalists and some racists — suddenly had a name: the alt-right movement.
The biggest lie, he said, is, The Internet is about you. We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn’t about us. It’s about the com...
Stone announced in early April that if delegates at the Republican National Convention had the nerve to switch from Trump to another candidate, we will disclose [their] hotels and room numbers. Anders...
Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal, said Allen Frances. That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal.Why? I asked.Th...
Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.
Manipulative? I said. I think you could describe that as leadership, he said. Inspire! I think it’s called leadership. Are
I'd been beguiled by the new technology -- a toddler crawling toward a gun.
I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don’t like.
He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I’d suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock.
Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia – photographs of Christopher with his arm around B...