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10/19/2015 How to Protect Your Personal Data—and Humanity—From the Government - The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/if-youre-not-paranoid-youre-crazy/407833/ 1/18

I KNEW WE’D BOUGHT WALNUTS at the store that week, and I wanted to addsome to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d putthem. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and

must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without

T E C H N O L O G Y

If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re CrazyAs government agencies and tech companies develop more and more

intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live freelives?

W A L T E R K I R NN O V E M B E R 2 0 1 5 I S S U E

Phil Toledano

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/

http://www.theatlantic.com/author/walter-kirn/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2015/11/



her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on thecounter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data fromthe fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept foralmost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deepsleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved formiscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.

It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down atmy wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with manyunknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words throughits mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled theapp?

The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I’d known they wouldwhen I “paired” them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Whoelse did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to theirconversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, orforever incorporated into the “cloud,” that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?

“I think it’s scanning us,” Dalton said, and somethingtold me he was right.

It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut moments” had been multiplying—jarring little nudges from beyond that occurred whenever I went online.One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend at an art gallery inHollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox,several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figureout: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one



to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers thatI’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposedto be confidential, these e‑mails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn’tI caused my loved ones enough pain?

Some of these disconcerting prompts were harder to explain. For example,the appearance on my Facebook page, under the heading “People You MayKnow,” of a California musician whom I’d bumped into six or seven times atAA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA custom, he had nevertold me his last name nor inquired about mine. And as far as I knew, we hadjust one friend in common, a notably solitary older novelist who avoidedcomputers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum andlearned that by entering my number into his smartphone’s address book(compiling phone lists to use in times of trouble is an AA ritual), the musicianhad probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo onmy page.

Then there was this peculiar psychic incursion. One night, about a year beforemy phone suggested I eat more walnuts, I was researching modern spycraftfor a book I was thinking about writing when I happened across a creepyYouTube video. It consisted of surveillance footage from a Middle Easternhotel where agents thought to be acting on behalf of Israel had allegedlyassassinated a senior Hamas official. I watched as the agents stalked theirtarget, whom they apparently murdered in his room, offscreen, beforereappearing in a hallway and nonchalantly summoning an elevator. Becauseone of the agents was a woman, I typed these words into my browser’s searchbar: Mossad seduction techniques. Minutes later, a banner ad appeared forAshley Madison, the dating site for adulterous married people that wouldeventually be hacked, exposing tens of millions of trusting cheaters who’d



emptied their ids onto the Web. When I tried to watch the surveillancefootage again, a video ad appeared. It promoted a slick divorce attorneybased in Santa Monica, just a few miles from the Malibu apartment where Iescaped my cold Montana home during the winter months.

R E L A T E D S T O R Y

Paranoia, Half a Century Ago

Adultery, divorce. I saw a pattern here, one that I found especiallyunwelcome because at the time I was recently engaged. Evidently, somecallous algorithm was betting against my pending marriage and offering mean early exit. Had merely typing seduction into a search engine marked me asa rascal? Or was the formula more sophisticated? Could it be that my onlinechoices in recent weeks—the travel guide to Berlin that I’d perused, thePorsche convertible I’d priced, the old girlfriend to whom I’d sent a virtualbirthday card—indicated longings and frustrations that I was too deep indenial to acknowledge? When I later read that Facebook, through clevercomputerized detective work, could tell when two of its users were falling inlove, I wondered whether Google might have similar powers. It struck methat the search engine might know more about my unconscious than I do—apossibility that would put it in a position not only to predict my behavior, butto manipulate it. Lose your privacy, lose your free will—a chilling thought.

Around the same time, I looked into changing my car-insurance policy. Ilearned that Progressive offered discounts to some drivers who agreed to fittheir cars with a tracking device called Snapshot. That people ever took thisdeal astonished me. Time alone in my car, unobserved and unmolested, wassacred to me, an act of self-communion, and spoiling it for money feltheretical. I shared this opinion with a friend. “I don’t quite see the problem,”he replied. “Is there something you do in your car that you’re not proud of?

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/paranoia-in-1967/409396/



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Frankly, you sound a little paranoid.”

My friend was right on both counts. Yes, I did things in my car I wasn’t proudof (wasn’t that my birthright as an American?), and yes, I’d become a littleparanoid.

I would have to be crazy not to be.

HE NIGHT I SAW my first black helicopter—or heard it, because blackhelicopters are invisible at night—I was already growing certain thatwe, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few

apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legendsvarious warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too manyinstances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.

The Mormon elder who told me when I was a teenager back in 1975 thatpeople soon would have to carry “chips” around or “be banished from themarketplace.”

The ex–Army ranger in the 1980s who said an “eye in the sky” could read mylicense plate.

The girlfriend in 1993 who forbade me to rent a dirty video on the groundsthat “they keep lists of everything.”

The Hollywood actor in 2011 who declined to join me on his sundeckbecause he’d put on weight and a security expert had advised him that thepaparazzi were flying drones.

The tattooed grad student who, about a year before Edward Snowden gavethe world the lowdown on code-named snooping programs such as PRISMand XKeyscore, told me about a childhood friend of his who worked inmilitary intelligence and refused to go to wild parties unless the guests agreed



to leave their phones locked outside in a car trunk or a cooler, preferably withthe battery removed, and who also confessed to snooping on a girlfriendthrough the camera in her laptop.

The night I vowed never again to mock such people, in January 2014, I wasstanding knee-deep in a field of crusty snow at the edge of a National Guardbase near Saratoga Springs, Utah, a fresh-from-the-factory all-Americansettlement, densely flagpoled and lavishly front-porched, just south of SaltLake City. Above its rooftops the moon was a pale sliver, and filling the skywere the sort of ragged clouds in which one might discern the face of Jesus. Ihad on a dark jacket, a dark wool cap, and a black nylon mask to keep mycheeks from freezing.

The key would be surviving those first days after theATMs stopped working and the grocery stores werelooted bare.

I’d gone there for purposes of counterespionage. I wanted to behold up close,in person, one of the citadels of modern surveillance: the National SecurityAgency’s recently constructed Utah Data Center. I wasn’t sure what I wasafter, exactly—perhaps just a concrete impression of a process that seemedelusive and phantasmagoric, even after Snowden disclosed its workings. Therecords that the NSA blandly rendered as mere “data” and invisibly, silentlycollected—the phone logs, e‑mails, browsing histories, and digital photolibraries generated by a population engaged in the treasonous business ofdaily life—required a tangible, physical depository. And this was it: amultibillion-dollar facility clearly designed to unscramble, analyze, and storeimponderable masses of information whose ultimate uses were unknowable.Google’s data mines, presumably, exist merely to sell us products, but thegovernment’s models of our inner selves might be deployed to sell us stranger



items. Policies. Programs. Maybe even wars.

Such concerns didn’t strike me as farfetched, but I was reluctant to air themin mixed company. I knew that many of my fellow citizens took comfort intheir own banality: You live a boring life and feel you have nothing to fearfrom those on high. But how could you anticipate the ways in which insightsbred of spying might prove handy to some future regime? New tools have away of breeding new abuses. Detailed logs of behaviors that I found tame—my Amazon purchases, my online comments, and even my meanderingsthrough the physical world, collected by biometric scanners, say, or license-plate readers on police cars—might someday be read in a hundred differentways by powers whose purposes I couldn’t fathom now. They say you canquote the Bible to support almost any conceivable proposition, and I couldonly imagine the range of charges that selective looks at my data mightrender plausible.

The National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center, south of Salt Lake City. Keeping the center’s servers



Everything about the data center was classified, but reports had leaked outthat hinted at the magnitude of its operations. Aerial photos on the Webshowed a complex of slablike concrete buildings arrayed in a crescent on abroad, bare hillside. The center was said to require enough power to supply acity of tens of thousands of people. The cooling plants designed to keep itsservers from overheating and melting down would consume fantasticquantities of water—almost 2 million gallons a day when fully operational, I’dread—pumped from a nearby reservoir. What couldn’t be conveyed by suchstatistics was the potency of the center’s digital nucleus. How muchinformation could it hold, organize, screen, and, if called upon, decrypt?According to experts such as William Binney, a government whistle-blowerand former top NSA cryptologist, the answer was simple: almost everything,today, tomorrow, and for decades to come. The data center, understoodpoetically (and how better to understand an object both unprecedented andimpenetrable?), was as close as humanity had come to putting infinity in abox.

With me was a friend named Dalton Brink, a former Navy nuclear technician.We’d driven down from Montana the night before, tuned in to one of thosewee-hours AM talk shows whose hosts tend to suffer from a wretchedsmoker’s cough and whose conspiracy-minded guests channel a collectiveunconscious understandably disturbed by current events. Their hushedrevelations are batty but compelling, charged with weird folkloric energies:Our nation’s leaders have reptile DNA and belong to abominable sex cults.Microwave stations above the Arctic Circle whose beams cause clusterheadaches and amnesia are crippling America’s truth-seeking subversives.To those who understand that fiction warps the truth in order to tell the truth,the literal meanings of such tales are beside the point. Nightmares are a formof news.

from overheating could require almost 2 million gallons of water a day. (Rick Bowmer/AP)



The manic broadcast caused us to reflect that in the days before our trip, we’de-mailed promiscuously about our plans, using all sorts of keywords thatmight draw the interest of national-security spybots. And supposing that wehad raised red flags, it was technologically conceivable that our movementswere being monitored through the GPS chips in our phones. Word had bythen leaked out about so-called stingray devices (fake cellphone towers, someof them mounted on prowling aircraft) that secretly swept up informationfrom any mobile phone within their range. We knew that had we beendeemed especially interesting, our phones might have been remotelyactivated to serve as listening devices—a capability first reported on way backin 2006, when the FBI employed the tactic in a Mafia investigation.

These wild speculations seemed less wild the next morning, when we woke todiscover that our car had a flat tire. The cause was a long, sharp screw with awasher fitted around its base so that it would have stood straight up whenplaced behind a tire. Since the tire had been fine during the drive, thepuncture must have occurred in Salt Lake City, where we’d stayed the night.A mischievous prank, no doubt. And yet there was doubt—not a whole lot ofit, but some. PRISM. XKeyscore. Stingrays. They sow doubt, and not only inself-styled gonzo journalists out on a lark. One might be forgiven for thinkingthat sowing doubt is one of their main functions.

We set out for the data center on a spare tire, stopping along the way to fix theold one at a Firestone store. Its employees dealt with us in an upbeat, tightlyscripted manner that appeared to stem from their awareness of severalcameras angled toward the service counter. The situation reminded me thatthe ferreting-out of secrets is merely one purpose of surveillance; it alsodisciplines, inhibits, robbing interactions of spontaneity and turning theminto self-conscious performances. The Firestone employees, with their smilesand good manners, had the same forced cheerfulness I’d long ago noticed inmy Facebook feed, a parallel universe of marriage announcements and



birthday well-wishes straight out of the Midwestern 1950s. Both wereminiature versions, it occurred to me, of the society we’d all soon inhabit—oralready did but had yet to fully acknowledge.

It was dark when we finally reached Saratoga Springs and looked for aninconspicuous parking spot from which to launch our raid. We ended up in ahivelike subdivision whose immaculate streets and culs-de-sac were namedafter fruits (Muskmelon Way) and religious concepts (Providence Drive).Above the beige houses rose the spires of identical brand-new Mormonchurches, packed in so closely that we could see six of them from our parkingspot. Many of the houses looked unoccupied, as though built for an army ofworkers that hadn’t yet arrived. In one of the driveways was a car whoselicense plate ended in NSA.

We had parked where Providence Drive ran out, at the edge of a field, across

Phil Toledano



which we could see the data center’s curving access road. It ran uphill to thefacility’s entrance: a pillared gate of Platonic, spectral beauty that seemedless like a military checkpoint than a dimension-spanning star bridge. Behindit, cool green lights marked the perimeter. We started walking. A few minuteslater we heard a thwop thwop sound. We turned in its direction, toward aridgeline, and as we did the sound changed character, deepening andthrumming in our chests. The craft had a palpable, heavy-bellied presencebut no detectable outline, no silhouette; the only visible sign of its approachwas a tiny blinking red light. It seemed to slow down and then hoveroverhead.

“I think it’s scanning us,” Dalton said, and something told me he was right;the modern nervous system, groomed by its experiences in airports, issensitive to high-tech probing. I gazed straight up at where I thought theinvisible vessel was and pictured two green thermal images—our bodies—displayed on a screen inside its cockpit. What other feats could the craft’sinstruments perform? Could they extract the contents of the phones buttonedinto the pockets of our coats, learn our identities, run background checks, anddetermine the level of threat we posed? Anything seemed possible. Thesystems protecting this new holy of holies were surely among the mostadvanced available.

We stood there in our boots, our heads tipped back, absorbing the interest ofthe floating colossus. The experience was strangely bracing. In the age of BigData and Big Surveillance, the overlords rarely sally forth to meet you. Thenit was over. The formless thing flew off, leaving us with the sense that we’dbeen toyed with. We were nothing to it, two pranksters in the snow.

Twenty more minutes of trudging through knee-high drifts brought us closerto the center than I’d thought would be permitted. We weren’t sure whetherthe place was functioning yet—I’d read about fires erupting inside the



A

buildings that housed the servers. Perhaps the reports were true; the placeseemed deserted. Moon-of-Jupiter deserted, as in incapable of sustaining life.Gazing at it from 50 yards outside its fence, I felt absolutely nothing comingback: no hum, no pulse, no buzz, no aura, no emission or emanation of anykind. It had substance but no presence, as though all of its is-ness wasdirected inward.

It awed me, the Utah Data Center at night. It awed me in an unfamiliar way—not with its size, which was hard to get a fix on, but with its overwhelmingseparateness. To think that virtually every human act, every utterance,transaction, and conversation that occurred out here—here in the world thatseemed so vast and bustling, so magnificently complex—could one day becoded, compressed, and stuck in there, in a cluster of buildings no larger thana couple of shopping malls. Loss of privacy seemed like a tiny issue, suddenly,compared with the greater loss the place presaged: loss of existential stature.

BOUT 20 MILES NORTH of Saratoga Springs, across the Wasatch Valleyfrom the NSA’s fortress of secrets, is a convention center in Sandy,Utah, that regularly hosts a gathering of some of America’s most

suspicious minds: the Rocky Mountain Gun Show. Dalton and I visited it thenext day, still frazzled by our encounter with the data center and convincedthat such a monstrous creation must cast a spiritual shadow of some kind. Wewanted to see what that, too, looked like up close.

Flanking the entrance to the gun show were two enormous army-style truckspainted in camouflage whose tires were the size of children’s wading pools.Their cabs were too high to access without steps. Both were for sale, whichseemed to mean there existed buyers for such behemoths, people who couldimagine needing them. To do what, however, in what exigencies? Totransport food across demolished cities? To blockade an airport? To storm thedata center?



Having lived in Montana for almost 25 years, I knew my share of apocalypticoddballs. They entertained some strange scenarios and counted among theirnumbers every sort of zealot, kook, and hater. But perhaps they were alsocanaries in the coal mine, preternaturally sensitive to bad vibrations thatcalmer folks were just starting to feel. I was coming to think of paranoia as aform of folk art, the poetic eruption of murky inklings, which made the gunshow a kind of gallery. The buying and selling of firearms and theiraccessories was only part of what went on there; the place was also a forumfor dark visions and primitive fears, where like-minded people, provoked bydevelopments beyond their ken, shared their apprehensions. A decade ago, ata similar event in Livingston, Montana, a fellow had told me that my TV wascapable of watching me back. I didn’t take him seriously—not until this year,when I read that the voice-recognition capabilities built into certain Samsungsets could capture and then forward to third parties the conversations heldnearby.

Inside the show, a clean-cut salesman stood beside a woman who gazed athim with an expression that bordered on idolatry. He showed us a line ofshotgun ammunition designed to shred a human target with scores of tiny,multisided blades. Another shell contained a bunched-up wire preciselyweighted at both ends such that it would uncoil and stretch out when fired,sawing its target into pieces. The man also sold “bug out” bags stocked withhandsaws, fuel pellets, first-aid kits, and other equipment that might provehelpful should relations between the watchers and the watchedcatastrophically deteriorate. The key, the man said, would be surviving thosefirst few days after the ATMs stopped working and the grocery stores werelooted bare.

The couple didn’t push their goods on us, only their outlook. When theylearned we were from Montana, they asked whether we’d seen the FEMAcamps where, supposedly, thousands of foreign troops were stationed in



anticipation of martial law. The salesman was concerned that these troopswould “take our women,” and he recommended a podcast—The CommonSense Show, hosted by someone named Dave Hodges—that would prepare usfor the coming siege. The man’s eyes slid sideways as he spoke, as though onalert for lurking secret agents. Later, I learned that his worry was not entirelyunfounded. In January of this year, the ACLU unearthed an e‑maildescribing a federal plan to scan the license plates of vehicles parked outsidegun shows. The plan was never acted on, apparently, but reading about itcaused me some chagrin; I’d thought the jumpy salesman had completelyflipped his wig.

The gun show was not about weaponry, primarily, but about autonomy—construed in this case as the right to stand one’s ground against an arrogant,intrusive new order whose instruments of suppression and control I’d seenfor myself the night before. There seemed to be no rational response to thefeelings of powerlessness stirred by the cybernetic panopticon; the choicewas either to ignore it or go crazy, at least to some degree. With its coollyplanar architecture, the data center projected a stern indifference to thequalms that its presence inevitably raised. It practically dared one to take uparms against it, a Goliath that roused the instinct to grab a slingshot. Theassault rifles and grenade launchers (I handled one, I hope for the last time)for sale were props in a drama of imagined resistance in which individualswould rise up to defend themselves. The irony was that preparing for such afight in the only way these people knew how—by plotting their countermovesand hoarding ammo—played into the very security concerns that theoverlords use to justify their snooping. The would-be combatants in this epicconflict were more closely linked, perhaps, than they appreciated.



A voice on the PA system announced that the show would be closing in 15minutes, causing vendors to slash their prices and customers to stuff theirbags with camouflage jumpsuits, solar-powered radios, and every sort ofdoomsday camping gear. In the car, headed north on I‑15 toward home, Idonned my new bulletproof shooting glasses while Dalton plugged his phoneinto the stereo and played an episode of The Common Sense Show. Its murky,subterranean acoustics suggested that it had been recorded in a falloutshelter. Dave Hodges’s guest, a certain Dr. Jim Garrow, purported to be aretired spook who’d spent the past few decades in “deep cover” and becomeprivy to many “chilling” schemes, including one to convert pro-sports arenasinto cavernous detention centers where noncompliant freedom lovers wouldbe guillotined en masse. Guillotined? Why bring back those contraptions?Because their blades killed instantly and cleanly, yielding high-grade corpseswhose body parts could be plundered and reused by ghoulish, power-madelites intent on achieving immortality.

The men’s demeanor as they described this nightmare was unhurried andcuriously blasé. Neurotics like me who were still learning to cope with being

Phil Toledano



W

monitored were prone to pangs of disquiet and unease, but for The CommonSense Show types, a strange equanimity was possible. What were merelyunsettling times for most of us were, for Hodges and his fans, a prelude todetainment and dismemberment, grimly fascinating to observe, potentiallythrilling to oppose, but no cause for prescription sedatives.

The podcast brought on a trance state ideal for long-haul driving. Memoriesof the monolithic data center faded and dispersed, supplanted by visions oforgan-stealing supermen that would reappear in my mind’s eye when I read,many months later, of an ambitious Italian surgeon intent on perfecting “fullbody” transplants involving grafting human heads onto bodies other thantheir own.

E CROSSED INTO southern Idaho at dusk and made a side trip to LavaHot Springs, an isolated mountain town renowned for itstherapeutic thermal pools. I wanted to wash the black helicopter

off me. Consorting with the twitchy gun-show folks after skulking around thedata center had weakened my psychological immune system. Paranoia is aninfernal affliction, difficult to arrest once it takes hold, particularly at a timewhen every week brings fresh news of governmental and commercialschemes that light up one’s overactive fear receptors: AT&T and the NSAcolluded in bugging the United Nations; the FBI is flying Cessnas outfittedwith video cameras and cellphone scanners over U.S. cities; Google has thecapacity, through its search algorithm, to swing the next presidential election.Once you know how very little you know about those who wish to knoweverything about you, daily experience starts to lose its innocence and littlethings begin to feel like the tentacles of big things.

Sitting waist-deep in a thermal pool, beneath the stars, I struck up aconversation with a teenager who’d dropped out of high school the yearbefore and seemed depressed about his prospects. There was no job he knew



how to do that a robot couldn’t do better, he told me, and he guessed that hehad three years, at most, to earn all the money he would ever make. When Itold him about my NSA excursion, he sighed and shook his head.Surveillance, he said, was pointless, a total waste. The powers that be shouldinstead invite people to confess their secrets willingly. He envisioned vastcenters equipped with mics and headphones where people could speak indetail and at length about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings,delivering in the form of monologues what the eavesdroppers could gatheronly piecemeal.

Memories of the data center faded, supplanted byvisions of organ-stealing supermen.

Whether this notion was brilliant or naive, I couldn’t decide, but it feltrevelatory. There in the pool, immersed in clouds of steam that fostered asense of mystic intimacy, I wondered whether a generation that found theconcept of privacy archaic might be undergoing a great mutation,surrendering the interior psychic realms whose sanctity can no longer beassured. Masking one’s insides behind one’s outsides—once the essential taskof human social life—was becoming a strenuous, suspect undertaking; whynot, like my teenage acquaintance, just quit the fight? Surveillance and datamining presuppose that there exists in us a hidden self that can be reachedthrough probing and analyses that are best practiced on the unaware, butwhat if we wore our whole beings on our sleeves? Perhaps the rush towardself-disclosure precipitated by social media was a preemptive defense againstintruders: What’s freely given can’t be stolen. Interiority on Planet X‑Ray is aburden that’s best shrugged off, not borne. My teenage friend was ontosomething. Become a bright, flat surface. Cast no shadow.

But I am too old for this embrace of nakedness. I still believe in the



boundaries of my own skull and feel uneasy when they are crossed. Not longago, my wife left town on business and I texted her to say good night. “Sleeptight and don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I wrote. I was unsettled the nextmorning when I found, atop my list of e‑mails, a note from an exterminatoroffering to purge my house of bedbugs. If someone had told me even a fewyears ago that such a thing wasn’t pure coincidence, I would have had mydoubts about that someone. Now, however, I reserve my doubts for thepeople who still trust. There are so many ghosts in our machines—theirlocations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake. That’s why paranoia, even in itsextreme forms, no longer seems to me so much a disorder as a mode ofcognition with an impressive track record of prescience.

Paranoia, we scorned you, and we’re sorry. We feared you were crazy, butnow we’re crazy too, meaning we’re ready to listen, so, please, let’s talk. It’stime. It’s past time. Let’s get to know each other. Quietly, with the shadesdrawn, in the dark, in the space that is left to us, so small, now nearly gone.

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

WALTER KIRN is the author of Up in the Air.

http://www.theatlantic.com/author/walter-kirn/

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