[...] Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. [...]

Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion.

She went to conferences with him and performed what she was too slow to realize was her function at them: to be younger and fresh and somewhat exotic, to excite the envy of male writers who hadn't traded in their wives yet or hadn't done so recently.

When Charles's several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. A day of frustration was mourned with three large bourbons. A day of conceptual breakthrough and euphoria was celebrated with four large bourbons. [...]

[...] Charles' big book had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers ("bloated and immensely disagreeable" Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) [...]

doing the egress paperwork on the mock B61

[...] Although that time was long gone, they'd never formally acknowledged its passing--so much remained unspoken behind the glare on Tom's glasses--and Leila couldn't help feeling hurt that he'd unilaterally acknowledged it by inviting the girl to live with him.

Their unscheduled freedom on the weekend seemed sybaritic in comparison.

[...] the false promise of the Internet and social media as substitutes for journalism--the idea that you didn't need Washington journalists when you could read the tweets of congressmen, didn't need news photographers when everyone carried a, phone with a camera, didn't need to pay professionals when you could crowdsource, didn't need investigative reporting when giants like Assange and Wolf and Snowden walked the earth ...

"[...] Shining his pure light on a world full of corruption. Lecturing other men on their sexism. It's like he wants there to be a world full of women and only one man who understands them. I know that kind of guy. They give me the creeps."

[...] Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. [...] she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men, and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.