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?