How Human Smoke Changed the Way I Read the Newspaper

Human Smoke is a book that makes a very slow and steady argument for pacifism, which is a really it's a revisionist history of World War II. When I read the book, when it came out in 2008, it literally changed the way I read the newspaper because I began to see the newspaper not as only the news of the day, but as a series of crumbs that were predicting the future. And so I wondered if I could ask you first about method. How do you educate yourself about something as complicated as multifarious as full of contradictions as a huge thing with an umbrella word war over it?