The man who made modern psyops

One of the things I enjoy most in non-fiction is meeting memorable new characters. Sometimes they’re living folks that authors bump into in their journey, but just as often they are people from history that are discovered and then conjured from the author’s research. 

Standout characters don’t just give personality to a story, they can help unlock big ideas that are central to the book in question. I still think about Fred McKinley Jones from Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite (CUR005), a Black inventor who revolutionized our eating habits through mobile refrigeration. And then there’s Sergey Zimov, the gruff Russian preservationist who (along with his son) is core to Ferris Jabr’s tale in Becoming Earth (CUR003). These characters are entertaining, interesting people who become become synonymous with the arguments that Twilley and Jabr are making.

Sometimes it’s what characters do that drags you through—their achievements or actions. But often it’s just their force, their curiosity, persistence or quirkiness. For that, I admire great character descriptions, particularly the kind of densely-drawn pocket portraits that capture a person’s essence in a couple of sentences.

One of my favorites for a long time has been the description of actor Alec Baldwin from this 2008 New Yorker profile by Ian Parker. In two long sentences Parker not only sets up the story but also tells me just about everything there is to know about the actor and his mood.

“Alec Baldwin, who stars in 30 Rock, the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin. He is fifty years old, divorced, and lives alone in an old white farmhouse in the Hamptons and an apartment on Central Park West—feeling thwarted, if not quite persecuted.”

Isn’t that just amazing?

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The character that stands out most from Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons is Paul Linebarger, an “odd military intelligence expert” propaganda specialist and prolific author. We meet him in the book’s preface, where we are given his credentials: he was the man behind a 1948 Army handbook called Psychological Warfare that, Newitz tells us, “came to define modern psychological operations in the United States.”

Linebarger wasn’t a spy, but he adopted many identities for his side hustle as a peddler of fiction. One time he was espionage author Carmichael Smith, other times the more literary Felix C Forrest, and most often an unstoppable writer of science fiction called Cordwainer Smith.

Perhaps it’s appropriate, given that Linebarger was a man of words, that Newitz’s most successful descriptions of him aren’t portraiture, but actually details of the things he wrote. We get to hear him through his own words and ideas, whether that’s professionally (through his novels and books) and personally, through his own diaries and recollections from family.

Newitz runs through the outlines of Cordwainer Smith’s fantastical stories, from tales of cybermen addicted to human sensations to yarns about intelligent animals who foment political revolution. We also peek at his teenage diaries, with travel journals from time accompanying his father—a lawyer and diplomat—on trips to advise the Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen. “‘I love Shanghai,” he wrote at 13 years old. “Paradise!!! I don’t want to go away. Nothing on earth equal to this place. I don’t want to go away. Never! Never! Never!!!” 

Newitz adds a precious detail here: that “the last two sentences” of Linebarger’s diary entry “were underlined, and the exclamation points got bigger and bigger until they ran off the page.”

We return to Linebarger’s story again and again throughout the book, and what emerges is a vision of a fascinating, enthusiastic, curious—and deeply strange—man who couldn’t stop stories spilling out from him.

As the picture builds up, we learn more about his views on psychological warfare and propaganda. And we discover more about his role in expanding the surfaces that the American military used these tactics. All of this helps to express how he believed in the power of stories to affect people.

And that is what makes him the standout character in Stories Are Weapons: because his personality and output glues together the argument that the book is trying to share with us.

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In news from around the Curious family, you might be interested to hear Carvell Wallace (CUR004, Another Word For Love) as he hosts an episode of Slate’s How To! podcast on “becoming an expat” — that is, leaving America to avoid what comes next. I hate the term expat, but I get the sentiment since the US presidency is about to pass along to its new incumbent.

This month’s political shift may have many of us thinking about how things might change, Annalee Newitz has a lovely column out in New Scientist about the ways that things don’t always become unrecognizable in the far future. It features a pair of 12,000 year old Australian sticks that demonstrate how ideas can survive for a very long time.

Finally, you might be interested in a video that was released before the holidays of Carl Elliott (CUR002, The Occasional Human Sacrifice) talking about medical ethics at Washington and Lee University. It’s a good counterpart to our own interview with him.

Don’t forget: you can help us share more of these great stories and ideas by becoming a paying member of Curious Reading Club. It’s just $25 each month for a great, hand-picked work of non-fiction.

And that’s all for this week. Please share this with friends, follow us on BlueSky or email your ideas to [email protected].

Onwards!

Bobbie