At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.

Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.

It's not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they're turned on.