Unrelatable 14. “Go ahead and step out of the car.”

I wasn’t a particularly socially conscious person. I was pretty disengaged from most of what went on in the present tense, interested in little that was real-world-oriented.

When the Weinstein scandal broke, in October of 2017, I was going through articles about the Utah nurse. At that point I wasn’t focused on sexual harassment. Not anymore. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time-years. And it was decades since I’d seemed to detect it everywhere, in places no one else could see it, in movies, plays, and novels, in this opera and that Broadway musical. (What I was actually seeing, of course, was sex in the context of a power imbalance.) I no longer remembered the circumstances under which each of Ted Bundy’s victims had disappeared or even remembered any of their names. Not one. I’d had other obsessions, over the years, and gone through periods in which I researched some subject or topic to death, often for no particular reason, because I never actually wrote anything about any of them. I just liked research.

That fall, though, for the first time in years, I was actually thinking of writing about something I was fixated on. The subject was police brutality-and lest anyone think me a particularly thoughtful or socially conscious person, I should say up front that I wasn’t. On the contrary, I was pretty disengaged from most of…