They were in the limousine, eastbound on Sunset in the evening gloom, the driver up front alone behind the smoked window and Erin and Vincent in the back with the tan leather and the mini-fridge. Her interview was up at the Warner Brothers. lot with a guy called Sean Hogan. Vincent had never heard of him, but according to Erin, Hogan was some kind of podcaster extraordinaire who got ten million downloads per episode. He sounded like someone worth talking to.

Vincent said, ‘No. What’s the intellectual dark web?’

She told him it was a term coined by a mathematician—Eric Weinstein—which described a group of people with big online audiences who were discussing topics that the traditional media generally didn’t touch. There’d been an article about them in the New York Times. This Hogan guy was a member, apparently.

Erin said, ‘Traditional media, particularly TV, is getting more and more partisan. Twitter’s exacerbated the problem. You look at the political commentary on cable: instead of strict honesty or realism, they’re looking for moral credit in the eyes of their viewership. So at the conservative end of the spectrum, it means reactionary hysteria and jingoism, and at the liberal end, there’s this fetish for inoffensiveness that forms a barrier to saying anything meaningful.’

Vincent said, ‘Obviously I don’t watch enough TV.’

She had some momentum now, and told him more—how the consequence of partisanship had led to abandonment of the middle ground when it came to political discourse, and so now there was this huge appetite for conversations of a moderate or centrist nature, and people were doing two- or three-hour podcast interviews and reaching an audience of five or six or even ten million people.

Vincent said, ‘That’s pretty good, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘Yeah. It is pretty good.’

He held on to her eyes for a second, and it was a nice moment: cruising along in the early evening with Erin Jones with a smile on her face. She was on a bench seat with her back to the driver—Vincent opposite—and she looked good in her jeans and cream blouse, make-up light and fresh, faint scent of her perfume in the cabin. He had that feeling again, that he should mention how hard it was keeping his attention on security, given that Erin herself took up a lot of his focus. How she looked, and then the part of him as well that needed to parse everything she said, looking for something that could be turned back as a clever line, make her laugh.

He wondered what she would say if he admitted all of that. Probably she’d just take it in with a quiet nod and then tell him to concentrate.