[...] In her disappointment with him, she idealized the truly wealthy, attributing improbable virtues to them. She'd cashed in her youth and her looks for life in a cramped three-bedroom house with a tin-pot progressive too good and kind to be divorced, and in her rage against her stupid-innocence she found better men to admire: Goldwater, Senator Charles Percy, later Ronald Reagan. Their conservatism appealed to her German belief that nature was perfect and that all the troubles in the world were caused by man. During my school hours, she worked at the Atkinson's Drugs on Federal Boulevard, and what she saw there was diseased human beings parading to the counter where she took their scripts and gave them drugs. Human beings busily poisoning themselves with cigarettes and alcohol and junk food. They weren't to be trusted, the Soviets weren't to be trusted, and she arranged her politics accordingly.

I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone's degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I'd financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.

"What are the polls showing?" [...] "Does Arne have a chance?"

"Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen," she said. [...]

"So, that's a no?" I said. "The polls aren't looking good?"

I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I'd grown up in, my father's blind progressivism, my mother's faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other's politics.

"I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations," Anabel said darkly.

"But the alternative doesn't work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that's where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It's like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house."

"[...] Start a magazine like nobody else's. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time."

"The Complicator."

[...] all we did was talk and talk, like a two-person emotional bureaucracy. The smallest of questions ("Why did you wait ten minutes to tell me your good news instead of telling me immediately?") triggered a full formal investigation, with every response filed in triplicate and the review period extended and re-extended while the archives were searched.

We returned to New York determined to make our own Sicilian-style spaghetti with fried eggplant and tomatoes, a dish so delicious that we wanted to eat it twice a week. Which we did, for several months. And here was the thing: I didn't get sick of it slowly. I got sick of it suddenly, radically, and permanently while eating a plateful whose first bites I'd enjoyed as much as ever. I set down my fork and said we needed a break from fried eggplant and tomatoes. The dish was perfect and delicious and not to blame. I'd made it poison to me by eating too much of it. And so we took a monthlong break from it, but Anabel still loved it, and one very warm evening in June I came home and smelled her cooking it.

My stomach heaved.

"We overdid it," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I can't sand it anymore."

Symbolism was never lost on Anabel. "I'm not spaghetti with eggplant, Tom."

Before he'd quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he'd taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, bu the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not to be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism.

[...] The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. [...]

In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then agan, he'd experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution--the scientific, for example--was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history's vanguard. If your boss was a shithea and your own husband was spying on you, it wasn't the regime's fault, because the regie served the Revolution and the Revolution was at once historically inevitably and terribly fragile, beset with enemies. This ridiculous contradiction was a fixture of bragging revolutions. No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn't be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.

[...] Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking--a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist's money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged--[...]