The government wants to turn your phone into a chemical weapons sniffer. Through the Department of Homeland Security’s “Cell-All” program, all of America’s proud citizens will be walking anthrax and biological terror detectors, which will be just about a thousand times more creepy than those ominous white boxes that you see chained up in the subway stations, hissing quietly. These machines also have cameras, so that, when they are set off, security agencies can decide whether it was a sarin gas attack or just a janitor with some ammonia. Which happens ALL THE TIME. Because, over the years, the BioWatch program has been responsible for dozens of false alerts and “zero” positive alerts for a chemical attack on the US of A. In fact, over the last decade, the government has nearly canceled every major sporting event and political conference, until, at the last minute, they realized the data were “faulty.” How faulty? So faulty that New York City “officials” demanded that the sensors be removed from the rooftops New York. They’d actually rather be anthraxed than have to deal with constant fake terror alerts.

NOW your government wants to spend $3.1 billion dollars to upgrade the nation’s silent terror-sniffing machinery, despite the fact that “actual experts” say the new system will not work, at all. (WHERE IS PAUL RYAN ON THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE?) Homeland Security will not speak to the press about this, nor will they provide documentation of testimony about how “it does not work” to a Congressional panel. Meanwhile, on rooftops across Manhattan, the government’s machines are collecting OUR air, and then it is ushered into some secret basement, where they run expensive tests on it, and then the lab rats watching the machines shrug and go back to writing sexy emails to their coworkers.

Photo by ZeroOne

“Our intelligence and behaviour requires optimal functioning of a large number of genes, which requires enormous evolutionary pressures to maintain. Now, in a provocative theory, a team from Stanford University claim we are losing our intellectual and emotional capabilities because the intricate web of genes which endows us with our brain power is particularly vulnerable to mutations — and these mutations are not being selected against our modern society because we no longer need intelligence to survive.”

The Snacky Tunes benefit in Williamsburg! Pat Kiernan trivia benefit night at The Bell House! Sybarite 5 at Carnegie; and 5×15 with special guest star… Grace Coddington!

Angelina Jolie was so amazed. It was only once in a while that she saw something that really made her feel real. It was so hard to feel real sometimes. Pancakes sometimes made her feel real. But pancakes were troublesome. A slippery slope. She wrote that down in her blue Moleskine book. “Pancakes are a slippery slope.”

She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.

“Be careful shaking your head,” said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching “Homeland” on his iPad. “A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face.” She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.

***

Angelina traced a pointer finger, its perfect oval nail painted with the Essie new-for-fall dark grey hue called “Stylenomics” lovingly over her own iPad screen. She cleared her throat. “These girls,” she said, out loud to no one in particular. “Look at these girls. What amazing, strong young women. They have been through so much, but they still made this amazing generator that creates electricity out of urine.”

“What have they been through?” Maddox asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that they never let anything keep them down, despite so many odds. They remind me of me.” A perfect tear formed in the corner of her eye, and as it started to make its silvery way down her cheek. Maddox and Zahara both lunged at her.

“I get to drink Mom’s sorrow nectar,” Zahara screeched.

But Maddox won. Smacking his lips, he said, “I’m going to grow up to be so much more empathetic than you,” he bragged.

“Whatever,” Zahara said. She went back to her own iPad, where she was uploading photos of vintage Cartier watches to her Pinterest.

“What’s going on out here?”

The door to the man’s master bath opened, and there stood Brad Pitt. In one hand was an iPad, in the other, a vaporizer.

“Oh Brad,” Angie said, leaping up, running over to him, pulling at the sash of her red Galliano sweater with one hand, clutching her iPad with the other. “You have to look at these amazing inspiring young women. Look at them.”

“Oh yeah. I read about that. Pretty cool.”

Her face grew stern. “Brad, I need to understand that when you gaze at these girls, you see that their faces glow with fortitude, a stalwart commitment to dignity, and the resolve to create a better life for people everywhere.”

He looked at the photo for a second. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I…” Then he paused. He touched the pads of his fingers to his graying beard. “Wait, it says here that four girls created a generator that makes electricity outta pee. Well, there are only three girls in this here picture. Where’s the fourth one?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Brad. Where is she?”

“I don’t know, I was only joking. Hey, it’s okay.”

“Brad, I don’t think this is okay. I think it’s not okay, okay?”

“Ange. I think she’s just… not in the picture. I think she just went to, I don’t know, get a soda or something.”

She seemed reassured for a minute. She lay one finger on the rosy cushion of her lips, then let it trail down over her round, firm chin, down the length of her neck, and then to the hollow at the base of her throat, where it made worried circles. “Maybe that girl is okay, but if this is a true competitor to petroleum, those girls are in danger. We have to get to them.”

The room was silent for a moment except for the sound of clicking.

“Brad,” Angelina said. “We’re going to Africa.”

Fuck, he thought. “Okay,” he said.

***

The eight of them left that night. The kids walked behind in the Los Angeles Tom Bradley International Terminal. Angelina huddled close to her fiancé, holding his arm. “Thanks for being so understanding,” she said.

“These girls do seem really cool,” he said. He wasn’t feeling so bad. There were those chocolates you could get now, at a dispensary in Marina del Rey. Marina del Rey was actually pretty cute, and, of course, this had made it cuter.

“Brad,” Angie said, looking into his eyes as he walked. This was actually one of the things he’d loved about her, that she could gaze into his eyes and walk at the same time, a skill to which Jennifer Aniston had never even aspired. (“Guess what’s not happening? Me crashing into shit just so you can, like, see my soul.”) Angelina spoke, her eyes as deep and opaque as trailing ponds. “Before we see those girls, I need to know that when you look at them, you see that their faces glow with fortitude, a stalwart commitment to dignity, and the resolve to create a better life for people everywhere.”

Brad nodded. This sounded familiar. Then he coughed a little. “Yeah, sure. Fine. Wait. I mean. Can I see the picture again?”

***

In London, waiting in the first-class Lufthansa lounge, as he absentmindedly tried to prevent Shiloh from making a kabob out of lemon slices on a coffee stirrer, Brad’s phone made its little cricket sound. It was George. He didn’t know whether to answer or not. He did.

“What’s up,” George said.

“Oh nothing,” Brad said. “Just hanging out by the pool.”

“Dude. Hey, I saw pictures of you guys at LAX yesterday. I know you’re not at home. What shithole have you been dragged off to today?”

Brad rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Uh… we’re in London.” He put his hand in his back pocket and fished out his airline ticket. “We’re going to uh, Lagos,” he said.

George snorted. “What the fuck are you going to Lagos for?”

Brad let his head fall back so that his mouth was open to the sky. He was so exhausted. All he wanted to do was lie on the couch and read David Macaulay books and old Dwells.

“We’re here because… well, did you read in the paper about those girls who invented a generator that can make six hours of electricity out of, uh… pee?”

“I find that very fucking hard to believe. And no, I didn’t read that. Where did you see that?”

“It was a huge story. I bet Stacy read it.”

“Let’s take a quick look at the things Stacy does. ‘Works out.’ ‘Makes salad.’ ‘Blows me.’ Oh shit, we’re at the end of the list, and we never got to “Reading about little African chicks and their pee pee.”

“Hey,” Brad protested. Yeah, sure, he’d rather be back in LA right now, but he got a little sick of George underestimating Angie. “Look,” he said, feeling really weird for even trying to be authoritative with George, but he had to try. “If this generator is really an alternative to petroleum these girls could be in danger. And… and… “ Shit. There was something else Angie had said about why this trip was important. He started going through his pockets. He was pretty sure he’d written it down. He found a piece of paper crumpled in his pocket. He started to read from it.

“This sort of technology …could. Uhh.” Shit. He couldn’t read his writing.

“This sort of technology could enable disadvantaged women around the world to have greater self determination?” George said.

“Oh my God,” Brad said “How did you know it said that?”

“Hey. Hey. Wait up. Stacy is sending you a link. What, babe? Hey, Brad, you gotta read this. Hey. Stacy’s sending you a link, okay?”

A second later Brad heard his email chime. He didn’t look. Stacy’s sending you a link! He had just been sent a link from someone who had been cut out of Big Momma’s House 2, and he was actually supposed to read it?

He slept all the way from London to Lagos, dreaming of steel-framed coffee tables, the kind with storage underneath.

***

When they reached Maker Faire Africa, the expo where the girls had debuted their generator, Angelina took out the Ziploc bag of kerchiefs she kept in her bag and tied one around her head, and did the same to all the girls. She walked past some of the displays — a tiny battery-powered dump truck, a loom. She wasn’t sure what was so interesting about a loom?

Angelina finally found the girls. They were sitting around in plaid uniforms in their chairs, just like they had been in the picture. At first she just stared at them for a few minutes. “Hi, “ she finally said. “Can I come hang out with you guys for a second?”

The girls exchanged looks. One of them giggled into her plaid skirt. They nodded.

“I just want you girls to know that you’re my heroes. Did you know that your invention is going to save lives? Anyway. Do think you can turn my pee into electricity?”

The girls all laughed and nodded. “We can turn anyone’s pee into electricity.”

Angelina found a big truck and arranged for it to drive onto the expo floor. And then another big truck. And another one. She had them all park in a triangle around her and she peed in private. She paid each of the drivers 10,000 nairas, and went back to the girls with the pee.

One of the girls took it from her. The other one started to plug in the generator.

“Wait,” Angelina said. “I thought you made electricity with this.”

“Well,” one of the girls said, “We have to use electricity to get the electricity.”

Angelina stared at the cord as she watched her urine swirling around. “But… are you guys going to figure out how to… you must be working — on how to make it so you don’t have to use anything to make it run? Except pee? Because you know that’s… that’s what people think you have done!”

One of the girls laughed. “How are we supposed to make something run just using pee? That’s impossible!”

***

Soon they were back at the airport.

“All we ever do is go to the airport,” Pax said.

“Shut up,” Vivienne said.

Angie was despondent as they boarded the plane. “I really thought that women all over the world were going to find self-determination through their own pee.”

“Well, Ange, maybe they will someday,” Brad said, and kissed the top of her head. She smelled nice, like dust and cucumbers.

A few minutes before take off, his phone rang. It was George again.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” George said. “I bet you’re leaving Lagos. Hey, Angie should make a movie. Leaving Lagosvegas. Oh my God. That is so stupid. I love it.”

“How did you know we were leaving?”

“Did you ever read that link?”

“No,” he said. He felt bad for what he’d thought about Stacy and Big Momma’s House 2 earlier. Stacy was really nice, and she had taught him how to do squats so his back didn’t hurt. He opened the article. It was long, but the basic gist of it was that the African girls thing was just a clever high-school science project, and not much more.

“How did you find that?” he asked.

“I didn’t find it,” George said. “Stacy found it. She Googled, I don’t know, ‘girls, pee, Africa, bullshit.’”

“I should have done that,” he said.

“You should have done a lot of things,” George said.

They took off after midnight. The kids fell asleep almost as soon as they were tucked into their seats. Angelina curled up in his lap. “Brad?” she said.

“Yeah, babe?” He rubbed a grain of sand from her hair between his thumb and forefinger.

“Let’s have another baby.”

Related: Why Emma Watson Really Left Brown

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl, which are for teens but adults can read on the beach. She lives in Nevada City, CA. Photo by Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com.

★★★★ Backwards went the season, for the moment. The air was warm with a faintly chilly underlayer, like spring arriving. The march through the closet to heavier coats reversed itself, and even the light jacket went unbuttoned. On the plaza by the 72nd Street subway control house, the emergency gate inside sounded like a tree full of twittering birds. Mother-of-pearl haze glowed in the air to the south, as long as there was sunlight to catch on it — but the sunlight, ignoring the false cues, kept dwindling on schedule.

Oh hey it’s Veterans Day, America’s most ambiguously celebrated federal holiday. Everyone (mostly) professes to love “the troops,” especially if it’s not too close to a news cycle about the troops urinating on the war dead or burning Korans or having sexytime with a lady biographer. But lots of people are bummed out by what the troops are expected to do, which is fight in imperial wars to secure oil supplies for people who won’t use the subway or get a Prius. What to do? Luckily, the day is almost over, so there’s nothing really “to do” except enjoy this video jukebox of surprising famous/infamous military veterans, such as teevee’s Bea Arthur, and horror’s Edgar Allan Poe, and 101st Airborne Veteran Jimi Hendrix!

Bea Arthur was so proud of her service in the U.S. Marines that she denied it for the rest of her life. Go, Maude!

Germany’s Marlene Dietrich hated the Nazis so much that she toured World War II battle zones to cheer up the Allied troops. “The Kraut” received the U.S. Medal of Honor in 1947 and was a member of the shadowy American spy operation Project Musac, which broadcast (wait for it!) musical propaganda. Still, when the war was over she used her American military connections to get her family safely out of post-war Germany; they had operated a movie theater during the war for the Nazis who ran the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jts9suWIDlU

Did you ever doubt Robert Duvall actually served in the Army?

Edgar Allan Poe, the “John McCain of his time,” used family connections to get out of actual military service and into West Point, where he impressed his fellow cadets with his funny poems. Then, he did an early “Kickstarter campaign” and raised $170 from the cadets to publish a book of his poems, called Poems. Later, he was buried alive or something. Just listen to Christopher Walken reading this, it’s the best way to remember our veterans. Halloween is rescheduled, for tonight. (Was Christopher Walken in the military? Probably, based on Pulp Fiction, anyway.)

As National Novel Writing Month slogs on, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

Do you remember the episode of “The Simpsons” where Marge scores the fake Chanel suit? She looks incredible in it, straight-up incredible, and then this rich bitch she went to high school with spots her and briefly ushers her into Springfield high society? Anyway, she has only the one fake Chanel suit, so she has to transform it into culottes and an evening gown, etc. in order to keep the illusion afloat, but ultimately she stays true to herself because of Homer and the kids.

My novel is that fake Chanel suit. Pardon me: the two chapters of my novel are that fake Chanel suit. I have been working on them since 2004, and they have never gotten any better or inspired, say, a third chapter, but I cannot quite bring myself to click-and-drag them into Trash. Moreover, like the fake Chanel suit, they represent an attempt to rise above my station in life, and, like my use of the fake Chanel suit, are full of awkward metaphors pushed to and just beyond the breaking point.

There are many, many humiliating reasons why these two chapters have become Not a Novel.

1. I have spent more time coming up with the correct epigrams (for both the two existing chapters and any future chapters I will absolutely never write) than I have on the work itself. After literally years of reflection, the chief epigram for my Not a Novel is from Ashbery’s “As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat”: “Down there, for a moment, I thought / The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, / Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade / That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly, / Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.” I know, I KNOW. I know. Yeah.

2. On a similar note, the title of my Not a Novel, “Canadian Champagne,” is taken from a line in a Secret Policeman’s Ball song: “The champagne was Canadian, / the hostess sang the songs. / I contemplated suicide / until you came along.” When my mother read my Not a Novel, she emailed back one line: “Shouldn’t the title be ‘the champagne was Canadian’ instead of ‘Canadian Champagne’?” NO, MOM, JEEZ. Twist!

3. This is the first sentence: “At the dinner party where I first learned of Timothy Brighton’s death, my niece Karen was overheard telling her boyfriend that the newly Rvd Cotton looked like nothing so much as a character from a pre-revolutionary Russian novel.”

4. Later, a character will say that “Free will is a Romish doctrine.” There’s a lot of High Anglican stuff. I am now an atheist.

5. It’s based on an actual unpleasant sex abuse scandal at a cathedral I used to sing at, so it would not simply be a bad novel, but an exploitative and gross one, and would also put me in an uncomfortable legal position.

6. Not only does it sound exactly and turgidly like Robertson Davies, it is set in my hometown, which Robertson Davies already fictionalized for The Salterton Trilogy many decades ago more successfully than I ever could.

7. The only really good part is a two-paragraph meditation on stoats. I have never seen a stoat, nor could I pick one out of a lineup of small-to-medium sized mammals wanted for chicken coop theft. The stoats are also a metaphor.

8. The protagonist is a middle-aged British ex-pat living in Canada, so he is constantly being placed in situations where he might get an opportunity to use Britishisms in order to demonstrate my excessive and collegiate and enduring Anglophilia. He’s not eating a roll, it’s a bun! This bin is for rubbish! That’s not an elevator, it’s a go-up box!

9. I wrote the two chapters in 2004. They got me into a creative writing workshop. I handed in the same two chapters, lightly fiddled with, for my final project. I submitted the same two chapters the next semester; they got me into a second creative writing workshop. I handed them in, completely untouched, for my final project. I read them aloud to a captive audience at a literary gathering. I submitted them for my college magazine’s fiction prize issue, pretending they were a short story called “Canadian Champagne” and not two chapters of Not a Novel.

10. I received an email from the editor of said magazine. She said that the fiction board was awarding me the prize, mostly because the twenty students on the fiction board were not allowed to submit their own work for the prize issue, leaving only two or three sad submissions in the box. She said, “however, we would really like it if you made it better, first.” A brief list of demands followed.

11. That fiction prize issue is mysteriously absent from the online archives. I have not lobbied for it to be uploaded.

12. Dr. Faye once said to Don Draper: “no one knows what’s wrong with themselves, but everyone else can see it right away.” Every time I write something, I’m paralyzed with fear by that thought. Philip Roth probably doesn’t worry about what Dr. Faye thinks about him. Also, I googled, and it wasn’t Dr. Faye. It was a completely different character, and I got the line a little wrong. Philip Roth wouldn’t have done that either.

13. This is NaNoWriMo, which I signed up for and blogged about. Because you are explicitly forbidden from reworking two chapters of a previous work, I decided I would write something else. I have not written a word. Instead of writing a single word, I have: reorganized my spice rack, made homemade chocolate ice cream, baked bread, studied a DVD titled “The Half-Halt Demystified,” taught my baby how to dance with the aid of musical greeting cards, taken several extremely old dry-clean-only articles of clothing to the dry cleaners, come extremely close to being able to complete a pull-up, watched the entire run of “Get Smart” and unsuccessfully searched for my G-spot. They say you’re supposed to make a “come here” gesture at yourself with the inserted fingers, but I think it’s made up.

If I sound reasonably Zen about my chapters at this point (and perhaps I do not?) it is owing to my best friend. One day, slightly despondent about my inability to write a third chapter, or a story about something else, or, really, anything other than “here is a link to a story about carrier pigeons with a great pun,” I told her that I feared I would never be a serious novelist.

“Nicole,” she said carefully, “perhaps you are not a serious person.”

And she was right.

Previously in series: My Misbegotten Historical Romance

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. Photo used for faux book cover by Amber Dawn Pullin.

“If you are a man who has been cursed with a less than generous handout in the pants department you might want to look away now. New research by the Journal of Sexual Medicine has shown that contrary to popular (wishful?) thinking penis size does matter when it comes to pleasing a woman in bed. The good news is that it only matters for some women and some types of orgasms.”
 — But good luck finding them. Now that the secret is out, everyone with a tiny todger is going to be on the hunt for these women. Sorry about your curse. [Previously]

Photo by Mr.joe, via Shutterstock

“Silly, Funny Stories About Really Serious Things”: A Chat With Writer Jon Ronson

by Elise Czajkowski

Bestselling British author and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson has found his way into the weirdest corners of society. His first book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, found him searching for the secret elite group that many extremists believe rule the world. His subsequent books, The Men Who Stare at Goats (which was made into a movie) and The Psychopath Test, explored, respectively, the odder elements of military techniques and mental disorders.

His latest book, Lost at Sea, which is out now, is a collection of Ronson’s magazine and newspapers articles from the last 15 years. Recently, I got the chance to chat with him about the journalism he’s written: the stories that went nowhere as well as the others that mysteriously took off.

Elise Czajkowski: So how did you start out writing about such weird things?

Jon Ronson: Well, I was living in Manchester in the north of England, and working with bands, and not making any money. The bands that I was managing were not flourishing, because it turned out I was a lousy manager. I took people’s potential and did nothing with it. And I was really young; I was only, like, 21, 22. As it happens, I wrote a movie based on one of the bands I worked with, which is about to start filming. So my past with bands has suddenly kind of come into life again.

But, anyway, to make ends meet I started just writing for the local listings magazine, like Manchester’s version of Time Out. And the stuff I was gravitating towards at the beginning was people who lived on the fringes of society and funny, absurd stories about the kind of crazy things that see us through. You know, belief systems that seemed kind of completely irrational to me. And I’ve got to admit, at the time, in my early 20s, I probably thought I was better than them. They were kind of nuts and I was, you know, sane and rational. But the older I get, the less I feel that. Now I feel completely on a par of irrationality with them. So that was it. I was just kind of drawn to those stories, but at the time, they were stories that didn’t really matter. They were just kind of the silly stories about eccentric people.

But then, a commissioning editor at Channel Four Television said, why don’t you take what you’ve been doing and do it about this Islamic fundamentalist in London called Omar Bakri, who says he’s not gonna rest until he sees the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street and the White House. And I really liked that idea. Treat him not as a kind of monster, but as a human with absurd character traits like we all have. We did this kind of silly, funny story about a really serious thing. And, ever since then, that’s what I’ve kind of carried on doing.

How do you know what will make a good story?

I think about that a lot. There are ingredients, but actually quite often, when you don’t have the ingredients, it still ends up being good, and sometimes even better, so it shows you should never have too many hard and fast rules. But I think at best, it’s a real mystery. There’s got to be something that I don’t know the answer to that I really want to know the answer to. Like with The Psychopath Test. All these eminent psychiatrists believe that psychopaths rule the world. You know, that’s such a big thought. Is there a way I can try and really find out if it’s true? Can I become a professional psychopath spotter, and try and spot psychopaths in positions of power? So that was like a real mystery itself. And then sometimes the mystery is, well, why does this person believe this stuff? So sometimes it’s smaller mysteries. But it all has to be a mystery.

I always hope that there’s a potential for humor. But not patronizing humor. It can’t be condescending. If I find that I’m heading into a sort of condescending place, I abandon the story. But humor’s great. Some kind of absurdity is good. If the thing that the person believes or the situation I’m going to get myself in feels kind of absurd and unfolding. And I think best of all, if it’s a kind of silly, funny story but about a really serious thing. I think that that’s good. So, you know, The Psychopath Test is about mental health and The Men Who Stare at Goats is about war.

Have there been stories that didn’t go anywhere?

Yeah. The main one, the one that was most depressing to me really was [about] credit cards. I had a real sense, like a real prophetic, almost, you know — I’m trying to think of another way of saying ‘prophetic’ that’s even more grandiose.

Like Nostradamus.

Yeah, I had Nostradamus-like sense that things were going to go wrong in the credit industry. And I became obsessed with trying to tell that story. And you know, it wasn’t just me. When the banking system collapsed, every one said, “Oh my god, nobody predicted this.” But actually, loads of people were predicting it. Friends of mine were coming round for dinner and saying, “This is a house of cards.” In my “Who Killed Richard Cullen” story [in Lost at Sea, about an English man who committed suicide in 2005 after racking up enormous credit card debt], there’s lots of people of saying, “You know, this is really bad. This isn’t going to last.”

But I couldn’t do it. I spent three months and I just couldn’t do it. And the reason was because I kept on meeting people who worked in the credit industry and they were really boring. I couldn’t make them light up the page. And, as I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people, because we want to look good, you know? So that was the most depressing one. To the extent that I would like get up in the morning — I’ve never really told this to anyone, but I’d get up in the morning, I’d go downstairs to breakfast and I’d, like, look at my cereal and burst into tears. And then I’d think, it’s only like nine hours until I can sit down and watch TV. After three months of that, I was thinking, I’m actually getting depressed here. So I abandoned it. My editor in New York keeps reminding me that, if I’d carried on with the credit-card book, it would have come out exactly when the banks collapsed and everyone would have turned to me. But I just couldn’t do it.

Have any of the stories you’ve written really affected you?

I think “Who Killed Richard Cullen” really stayed with me. [It] gave me a whole different view on how the world works. Almost conspiratorial, because it sort of is a conspiratorial story about how the people at the top are coming up with kind of clever, almost invisible ways to manipulate us down below and keep us enslaved in their credit cards. So that story. I think The Psychopath Test, that whole book definitely did. I suppose it’s the stories that teach us that the people above us don’t always act in benevolent ways. Those are the stories stay with me the most.

I was really interested, in “Amber Waves of Green” — I think Jon Stewart wanted to talk about “Amber Waves of Green” but I just blahed on about superheroes. [The story looked at the lives of six people of different incomes levels in the US.] The thing that really interested me was the idea that at each income level in that story, people come up with kind of illusory reasons why they shouldn’t get any richer. So Franz thinks its fine to earn $200 a week as long as people talk to him respectfully, which is kind of an illusion, right? And then Dennis and Rebecca, [who] earn five times what Franz earned, said, “Well, if we earn more money then who knows, we might become sex and drug addicts, because people in our church have and it’s such a slippery slope, if you have more money.”

And then the woman [making $1.25 million a year] that’s going, “Well, I don’t want my own plane, because imagine what a nightmare it’d be to have your own plane.” So, all the way up, people are coming up with irrational illusory ways to say, “It’s okay that I’ve been forced into this position in life.” My brother told me actually that other people have written about this idea, that this need to feel respected is a really guiding force in people’s lives. And for Franz, it’s almost a way to keep Franz in his place, So that really stuck with me. And in fact, I’m going to write more about that. I think that’s a really interesting subject.

You interact with a lot of cult leaders and very charismatic people. Do you worry about being influenced by these people who professionally influence other people?

No, I sort of like it when I feel influenced by them. I like a story most of all when I feel like I’ve gone through some kind of change. And on two occasions, that change has happened in a way that I’ve changed for the worse. I didn’t realize it, and it was only when I was writing the book that I changed back again to how I’d been before.

One was in Them, when I really became a kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist for awhile, started thinking I was getting followed when I wasn’t, and all of that. And then the other time was with Psychopath Test, when I became totally drunk with my abilities to spot psychopaths everywhere. On both occasions I really kind of loved that. I’ve always thought, if you’re lucky enough to be able to write a book, you should really go through some kind of hell to write it.

There’s a lot of variety in the kind of stories you write. Do you have a favorite type of story?

I just love going to shadowy places. Like this story I’m doing for the Guardian, which I can’t tell you about, but I ended up in this really crazy housing project in a tiny town in Tennessee, and — I’ll tell you one thing about it. Every apartment in this housing project had a loud speaker, so the person downstairs at the reception could talk to everyone at once. And when I was there and that happened, I [was] just so elated to be somewhere where people don’t get to go, and people don’t get to see. It’s a kind of mysterious shadowy place, and yet I’m there and I’m experiencing it. I love that more than anything. Adventures into places where people don’t get to go. In Them, I remember feeling the same thing at a Ku Klux Klan compound. People were saying to me, it must have been terrifying. And you know, I had to be wary and on my guard, but more than that, I just felt privileged to be anywhere where people don’t get to go.

[Like] Phoenix Jones, my real-life superhero. He’s not in the hardback in America because Riverhead brought it out as a short e-book, but I’m sure it’ll go into paperback. I still worry about him, that he’s going to end up getting killed. It’s one of my favorite stories.

Almost all of the stories in Lost at Sea take place either in the US or the UK. Have you found a big difference between the US and the UK, in the types of stories and the people?

Not really. I mean the main difference is Americans do tend to be a lot more confident and outgoing and outspoken than British people. Which at its worst means you get more narcissists in America than you do in Britain. That’s the kind of downside of confidence. I’ve met some terrible American narcissists.

Haven’t we all.

Yeah. They’re like my least favorite sort of people. I really can’t stand them. But the upside is that Americans are kind of lovely, especially the more introverted, quiet ones. Other than that, I don’t feel there’s a huge difference.

Do you think being more well known has changed how people treat you?

There are upsides and downsides to it. Like, new doors open and then other doors close. I think they probably balance each other out. So for instance, people who don’t know who I am, that then discover that I have a connection to George Clooney. That helps. And I completely milk it in my introductory emails to them. I always say, my first sentence, “One of my nonfiction books, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was turned into a film starring George Clooney.” That’s definitely opened some doors.

Tell me about this movie that you wrote.

It’s a comedy about being in a band, and its very funny, I think. It’s called Frank. Michael Fassbender plays Frank, and there’s a character based on me called Jon, and it’s about their relationship inside the band. Jon is the keyboard character and Frank’s the singer, so it’s about the relationship between Jon and Frank.

You played the keyboard?

Yes, but not well. I could only play C, F, and G. Luckily the band I was in, all the songs were in C, F and G.

Have you written other fiction?

No, first time. At first, I just couldn’t get my head around it. You know, what we do, whatever happens at this table is our material. But in a movie, you go into a restaurant, you sit down, and there’s fucking nobody there. The restaurant doesn’t exist. It’s like a big white space, and that completely sort of fucked with my mind, because I was thinking, well, there’s nothing to tell me what is acceptable for this script and what is not acceptable. Like in journalism, what’s acceptable is what actually happened, and what’s not acceptable is what didn’t happen. But with fiction, nothing happened, so you have to make these kind of complete judgments on what would the character do that? And it’s like, you could say, yeah, of course the character would do that, because this character doesn’t exist, so he could do fucking anything. He can go up to space, he can do anything.

So that completely screwed me with me for about two years. This was like a five-year process. Then after awhile, these characters start to form, and you do start to think, okay, I know enough about [the characters] to sort of know what they would or wouldn’t rationally do in a situation. So the further into the process you get, the more it actually feels like journalism. Because the stuff you’ve written does exist and then that informs the rest of it. So the second half of the process was actually really similar to journalism and I really liked it a lot. I don’t know whether I could do it again.

It seems like you’re always working. Why do you think that is?

You know what, I asked Randy Newman the same question one time when I was interviewing him, and he said it’s because it’s how I judge myself and how I feel better. And because everything I’ve ever thought has already been thought by Randy Newman, then uh, I think that’s probably my answer as well.

Related: A Chat With Fran Lebowitz and How Not To Die Of Rabies! A Chat With Bill Wasik And Monica Murphy

Elise Czajkowski is a freelance journalist in New York City. Feel free to tweet at her with abandon. Photo of Ronson by Barney Poole.

“I’m a tattoo guy, and it was something fun. I was trying to make politics fun. I didn’t change no lives; I’m no hero. But I shed blood for this campaign, and I’m glad to know that I did all that I could.”
 — The Indiana man who got a 5-inch-long Mitt Romney logo tattooed on the side of his face has no regrets.