Excerpt: So he said it can’t be a Black. So I said, “For God’s sakes, Judge Murphy, that’s the whole point of the Goddamn story!” So he said, “No, it can’t be a Black.” Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, “Well, you gotta take the perspiration off.” I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, “Fuck you,” and he hung up.

Excerpt: In April 1969, I was arrested, along with a few friends, for conspiring to blow up the Liberty Bell, which happened to be pretty close to where I was living in Philadelphia.

So as not to keep the reader in suspense, let me say here: I didn’t do it, nor did my friends. But the local police, the FBI, and the Justice Department said I did. That I’m not writing this from a jail cell is in part thanks to a constitutional order then still intact enough to protect my civil liberties, something we can be far less certain about today.

Excerpt: In this new hellscape AI has created, most folks don’t know what’s real anymore and the default response becomes “this is AI” which damages an artist’s reputation and dismisses their efforts. That non-zero consequence has a significant impact on the viewer’s initial perception the work.

Artists will always have their work judged by a viewer but I can’t recall a time where I’ve ever felt so on trial with folks demanding me to prove it’s real.

Excerpt: He left me a copy of the script. He wanted Traci to be the star. I looked through it. It was the usual, plain-as-a-bean few pages. There were several lengthy dialogue scenes for her, a number of nude scenes – you know the deal: a shower scene, topless by the pool – and then finally a sex scene with Tommy Byron. She hadn’t done anything like that, but I thought she could do it because she was darn confident about everything.

Excerpt: Just about every claim made about psychopathy follows the same path. It begins with one or two studies that find tentative evidence to support some common claim. But a few years later, there is a torrent of studies that either fail to corroborate earlier results or straightforwardly falsify them. This trajectory has held for other claims, such as that psychopathic persons are extraordinarily dangerous, that they have impaired impulse control, that they are unresponsive to cognitive behavioral therapy, that the construct may have genetic biomarkers, or that psychopathy is associated with structural and functional brain abnormalities. Name something you’ve heard about psychopaths, and researchers will show you that it’s little more than a dubious speculation. Why has it proven so difficult for experimental psychologists to corroborate the idea of the psychopath?