Who is Anna?

So I was trying to think what she might be like, and because it was a village of lead miners and shepherds, I thought probably she would have been married to a lead miner, and maybe he would have died in a mine collapse, and maybe she already had a couple of kids.

And I imagined her as something like many of the women that I'd met in the Middle East and Africa covering stories, who were women who thought that their lives were going to be very circumscribed, that they were going to be very domestic, that their business would be To keep house and have children.

And then a disaster happened to them.

And they had to step out of that expected role.

And then they did in the most unexpected ways.

And I'd seen this over and over again.

How did you find and nail that voice of Anna?

Like, understanding crypto and being, like, the forensics guy around that, can you dig in a little bit to maybe explain to our lay audience and me, a lay person, um, how crypto works and why it is such fertile ground for criminality?

So it, it was created out of an idealistic, um, and libertarian desire by an anonymous person, whose identity has never really been disclosed, to create something that wouldn't have the flaws of the existing financial system that were exposed by the financial crisis in 2008 when it was shown how absolutely flawed the banking models and the exchanges that we relied on, how flimsy they could be.

So this person came up with a cryptographic store of value, and, you know, I don't wanna go too deep in the weeds, but just take Bitcoin, which is the main example.

It is basically a, a hash, which is 64 letters and numbers in a string, that represents a financial transaction that is scrutinized and agreed upon by anybody who has the computer power to do it.

So people all over the world Verify this transaction, and it is recorded forever.

It can't be erased, and it can't be changed.

It's supposed to be 100% anonymous, and it exists outside of the control of any government.

And you brought up Al Capone, so I thought it might be worth revisiting that story and talking a little bit about the role of Michael Malone.

Can you describe what you're trying to do in that book?

So it was a true story of the great racehorse of the 19th century, Lexington, who was the fastest horse of all time at that point and a great celebrity.

I mean, thousands flocked to his races and racing was a national obsession in those days.

The only way I can explain it is it's, you know, It's like baseball if we all played it because everybody still had a horse or was one generation away from having a horse and people would race their horses down the main streets of the town, which is how we got the quarter horse.

But these thoroughbred races were massive spectacles and they were a big source of prestige for the racehorse owners.

And it was also a nascent rivalry between North and South.

these competitions between a Northern horse and a Southern horse would get all the blood up about the differences between the two societies.

And was that based on the fact you lived there and just enjoyed the history of it?

Can you describe what you're trying to do in that book?

So it was a true story of the great racehorse of the 19th century, Lexington, who was the fastest horse of all time at that point and a great celebrity.

I mean, thousands flocked to his races and racing was a national obsession in those days.

The only way I can explain it is it's, you know, It's like baseball if we all played it because everybody still had a horse or was one generation away from having a horse and people would race their horses down the main streets of the town, which is how we got the quarter horse.

But these thoroughbred races were massive spectacles and they were a big source of prestige for the racehorse owners.

And it was also a nascent rivalry between North and South.

these competitions between a Northern horse and a Southern horse would get all the blood up about the differences between the two societies.

Now, you wrote a book about Martha's Vineyard as well, and was that based on the fact you lived there and just enjoyed the history of it?

Over to you,

Geraldine.

I looked at that paragraph describing what we were supposed to be talking about, and I had exactly the same reaction as you.

But I will try.

Yes.

I think they were getting at something about how are we going to cope with the aftermath of COVID? What did it really do to us? And I think it's impossible to answer that question yet because we're still seeing the reverberations of the experience.

But the problem also is I think all of us experienced COVID in different ways.

Geraldine, do you see what Rachel is talking about and what Julia is to some extent as well about a sense of wanting to blow things up at the moment?

Mm.

And I just enjoyed, you know, the, the cruise.

Um, and he was mostly like that, although, you know, when I was reading his journals I realized that that came hard-won sometimes, that he had a lot of insecurities and, uh, and a lot of them were totally unfounded.

I mean, I found this one line in the journal.

Uh, I was off reporting somewhere, and this was before he'd been hired by The Wall Street Journal, and, uh, he was still waiting for this st- staff job to eventuate that he'd been sort of, kind of promised, and it hadn't happened.

And so he writes in his journal, "I've come to accept that I may never amount to something in journalism." And I read that and I just laughed out loud because, like, one year later he would be the star reporter in the London Bureau [laughs] of The Wall Street Journal covering the revolution in Romania and then, uh, leading, um, the coverage of the first Gulf War and being the first Western reporter into liberated Kuwait, and then he'd have the Pulitzer Prize.

So, it's so, it was, it, it was funny to me that he thought that, and then it was also sad that he'd been insecure at that time, and he had not verbalized that.

Down doggy

Why did you need to?

It had been three years since he died and I was not right in the head.

I realized that my whole life was one long performance.

Every time I left the house, it was as if I was putting on a costume and a mask and going out and acting a role.

And that role was woman being normal.

So I did all the things I was supposed to do if I were a normal woman, like be the secretary of the PTO and serve on the local conservation commission and do my work and even go on book tour.

But I didn't feel normal.

Where did you start?