I’ve read Cheney’s and Bush’s autobiographies. Books by Sarah Palin and Anne Coulter. I read articles on Breitbart.

I chose this book because it’s written by a physicist, very elderly now, who has spent all his life working in controlled fusion. The title is a take on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . The first part of the book is Chen claiming that fusion is indispensable for our future, and why. He has a very readable section on climate change, a section on fossil fueled energy and a section on renewables—in which I disagree with him strongly, because he denigrates solar energy—and then goes on to say that we need fusion.

It’s very gratifying to grow utterly incensed by the Mail Online and come away from it full of fury and absolute outrage at its prejudice and xenophobia — and support for Brexit.

Even though I’m not a utilitarian, and so I tend to disagree with Singer in terms of the general framework, this book literally changed my life. I read it many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.