If you couldn't kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.
If a conscience is living in a world defined by regrets, then yeah, I’ve got a conscience. My very first thought every morning is what I’ve done wrong. That
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
He interviewed thousands of American infantrymen and concluded that only 15–20 per cent of them had actually shot to kill. The rest had fired high or not fired at all, busying themselves however else...
Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners—young, black—have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncri...
But they’re being labeled bipolar. That’s an enormous label that’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life.
When I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I’d anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse. I
Maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I
We’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.
We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we w...
We should be like dogs.
We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.
We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.
Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,’ said Tony.
This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad, he said. I faked it. He explained. The first n...
They’ll be brought great distances, Trump had said. We’re not dropping them right across. They learned that. President Eisenhower. They’d drop them right across, and they’d come back. Then when they f...
She paused. But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most peop...
Michael Fertik took me for dinner and talked to me about the criticism people often level at him, that ‘any change of search results is manipulating truth and chilling free speech’. He drank some wine...
Judge Ted Poe’s critics—like the civil rights group the ACLU—argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincide...
I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?