The strange sub­theme of David Samuels’ New Yorker por­trait of John Coster-Mullen, a man obsessed with the truth about the first atomic bombs, is actu­ally journ­al­ism itself:

Coster-Mullen sees his pro­ject as a divert­ing men­tal challenge—not unlike a cross­word puzzle—whose goal is simply to present read­ers with accur­ate inform­a­tion about the past…

Driven by his desire to solve a great puzzle, he is per­son­ally affron­ted by recycled inform­a­tion and sec­ond­ary sourcing, which often leads him to express con­tempt for people who are lazier than he is—a cat­egory that includes vir­tu­ally everyone.

Among other things, Coster-Mullen’s book makes clear that our belief in the secrecy of the bomb is a theo­lo­gical con­struct, adop­ted in no small part to shield ourselves from the idea that someone might use an atomic bomb against us. Surely, hos­tile powers could eas­ily obtain the kind of inform­a­tion that Coster-Mullen has acquired, how­ever painstak­ingly, in his spare time…

[Coster-Mullen’s] pro­ject showed both a fan­at­ical devo­tion to detail and a hazy grasp of what ordin­ary con­sumers might pay for…

Coster-Mullen is proud to have helped estab­lish “a pub­lic, per­man­ent record of the facts” about the Man­hat­tan Pro­ject. As mad­den­ing as his per­son­al­ity can be, it is hard to ima­gine what Amer­ica would look like without the small and shrink­ing num­ber of people who engage in painstak­ing, firsthand research in order to sep­ar­ate the truth from the body of sup­posed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest.

A corol­lary of this insight, of course, is that much of what we think we know is wrong.

Sound like any­thing or any­one familiar?