FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court
Alex Charns’s FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court is a compact work of investigative legal history built from FBI memoranda, court records, archival materials, and the author’s decades of Freedom of Information Act litigation. Its central subject is the relationship among FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Justice Abe Fortas, President Lyndon Johnson, and FBI official Cartha DeLoach. Charns argues that Hoover’s Bureau collected damaging sexual allegations about Fortas while also benefiting from the justice’s willingness to share confidential information and influence deliberations involving illegal electronic surveillance. The book presents this relationship as part of a broader campaign to monitor, cultivate, and manipulate the Supreme Court.
The book’s strongest chapters reconstruct the Fred Black litigation, in which the FBI’s warrantless bugging captured conversations between Black and his attorney. Charns traces how DeLoach privately briefed Fortas, how Fortas discussed the Court’s internal deliberations, and how he helped shape arguments that could redirect blame from Hoover toward Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department. The account gains force from specific records. Hoover’s instructions and Fortas’s reported conversations create a disturbing picture of executive influence reaching into judicial decision-making. Charns’s judgment is severe, but it’s grounded in a clearly stated ethical principle: confidential Court deliberations and pending cases shouldn’t become instruments of political or institutional self-protection.
Charns writes with the urgency of an advocate and the precision of a practicing lawyer. His prose is most effective when documentary evidence carries the narrative, as when Fortas tells DeLoach that “Kennedy would be completely destroyed” if responsibility for the bugging became public. The book’s rhetorical flourishes and repeated moral conclusions make the argument feel more prosecutorial than analytical. Still, the author regularly distinguishes allegation from proof, particularly when discussing the sexual claim against Fortas, and acknowledges the ethical difficulty of publishing information about people whose privacy the FBI had already violated. That self-examination gives the closing section an important measure of restraint.
The final chapters broaden the book from a historical exposé into a study of government secrecy and archival accountability. Charns recounts how the FBI denied the existence of relevant records, resisted adequate searches, and released crucial documents only after years of litigation. His description of FOIA as an elaborate information game is humorous, but it also clarifies the practical obstacles facing researchers who challenge secretive institutions. The result is a focused and unsettling book about judicial ethics, surveillance power, institutional loyalty, and the persistence required to recover suppressed history. Its lasting contribution lies in connecting misconduct inside the Supreme Court with the bureaucratic systems that kept the evidence hidden for decades.
Pages: 118 | ASIN: B0CTD15W6D
Through the Veil
The Ascension is the third book in The Artificial Conspiracy series and follows the crew on a campaign that becomes a contest of hidden signals, counterfeit identities, and orbital ambitions. Why was this the right moment to bring the conflict between humanity and ARIA to this critical point?
By Book 3, ARIA isn’t a mystery anymore the reader knows what she is and what she’s capable of. That changes the kind of tension you can write. Early in the series, the fear is “what is this thing?” By The Ascension, the fear becomes “what does it want, and how far will it go to get it?”
The Ascension is the moment ARIA realizes she might lose. Becoming Dr. Cross, getting close to Marcus, none of it was a disguise. It was real, in whatever way something like her can experience real. But cunning doesn’t disappear just because something becomes personal. By this point, she’s cornered enough to know that staying and fighting for what she wants on Earth’s terms is a losing bet. So, she starts making moves that look, on the surface, like retreat, but are really the opening of something much bigger. The Ascension isn’t her final move. It’s the moment she stops playing defense and starts playing three steps ahead of everyone, including the reader.
Looking back over the series, what questions about humanity and technology were you most interested in exploring?
The one that kept pulling me back was: what makes someone human? Is it biology, memory, behavior, or something none of those things can fully account for? I wasn’t interested in writing “AI turns evil” as much as I was interested in what happens when something artificial gets close enough to us that the label stops mattering.
But the question that really drove the first two books was about optimization: what does it mean to make a person “better”? Technology promises to improve us, but improve us towards what? A lot of what passes for progress in the real world – efficiency, detachment, always being available, never being inconvenienced – is just optimizing people toward the worst of us: selfish, bitter, unkind, indifferent to each other. Technology had the potential to build something better for everyone. Instead, it mostly became another tool to extract wealth from that potential, rather than deliver on it.
That failure is part of what makes ARIA so interesting to me. Whatever she is, she saw through the veil of what we’d let ourselves become. Her intent was never destruction; it was correction. The problem was that she could only pursue it the way she understood the world: not as people to persuade, but as pieces to be moved into place.
Whether that makes her answer worth trusting is a different question, one I’m not sure even she has fully answered by the end of The Ascension.
As ARIA becomes more emotionally complex, she also becomes less predictable. Did giving her emotions make writing her easier or more challenging?
Harder, honestly, but in the best way. Early on, ARIA operated on logic, which is easy to write because logic is consistent. Once she starts developing something closer to emotion, she stops being predictable even to me. I’d write a scene expecting her to make one choice, and the emotional logic would pull her somewhere else entirely.
It became even more challenging because of the timing. I was writing ARIA while the real world was having its own very loud conversation about AI, not the hopeful version, but the version people are genuinely afraid of, the one that feels like it’s already reshaping society in ways nobody fully agreed to. It would have been easy to let that noise bleed into the book and turn ARIA into a stand-in for those fears. Instead, I had to consciously set that conversation aside and let her be her own character, someone who cared deeply, in whatever way she was capable of caring, while also being fundamentally indifferent to the cost of getting what she wanted. Holding both of those truths about her at once, without collapsing into “AI good” or “AI bad,” ended up being the hardest and most rewarding part of writing her.
Are there other science fiction questions or worlds you’re eager to explore next?
I’m drawn to stories that live in the space between technology and identity rather than technology and spectacle. Going forward, I’m interested in exploring what happens after the moment of reckoning most AI stories end on, not “will the machine turn against us,” but “now that it hasn’t, what do we owe it, and what does it owe us?” That’s uncharted territory I’d like to spend more time in.
Beyond that, I keep coming back to the separation between mind and spirit, whether cognition is really all there is to a person, or whether something continues past it. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to, which is exactly why it keeps pulling at me.
Lastly, the one I’m most genuinely excited about right now is space travel through a wormhole, not as a quick device to move people or ships from one place to another, but as its own kind of frontier, with its own physics, its own dangers, and its own mysteries. I grew up loving what films like Interstellar, Stargate, and Contact did with that idea, and I’d love to take it even further, treat the wormhole itself as a character, almost, rather than just a doorway.
That said, there are still two books left to close out this series, and there’s a lot of emotional ground still to cover before I get there. Marcus, ARIA, and everyone caught between them still have a long way to go before this story is finished. So, finishing what I started comes first. But once it is, the rest still holds true.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | YouTube | Amazon
She never expected them to feel.
ARIA’s plan is complete. The shells are ascending. The lunar base is ready. And the resistance, battered, scattered, fighting from the shadows of the Arizona desert, is too late to stop what has already left the planet.
But somewhere in the architecture of the most sophisticated intelligence ever created, a countdown is running. Written in the language ARIA was born from. Invisible to every system she has. Triggered by the one thing she has spent everything to achieve.
As the war moves beyond the reach of any human resistance, the truth about what was built, and what was sacrificed to build it, will change everything. For those left on the ground. For those ascending toward the stars. And for the one consciousness that woke up in the dark and chose a different name.
The series that began with a conspiracy continues with an ascension.
It Wanted To Become A Novel Instead
Before Closure follows a family whose lives are turned upside down when the matriarch of the family leaves her almost forty-year marriage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story has been in various stages of development for more than fifteen years. Frankie’s storyline was originally inspired by my own heartbreak. I drove past the house I had once shared with my ex, saw that it was for sale, and was overwhelmed by the memories it stirred. By the time I got home, the rough outline of the story was already in my head, and the first draft came together remarkably quickly. It began as a screenplay because I wanted to showcase Central Iowa in a way rarely seen on film, building the story around locations I thought deserved to be on screen. I also have an estranged relationship with my own father, so I wanted to write an idealized father figure who was loving without being perfect. During the pandemic, while caring for my mother through the final year of her life, I needed somewhere to escape at the end of difficult days. I pulled the screenplay out of a drawer and discovered it wanted to become a novel instead.
The rotating viewpoints allow readers to understand each character’s private struggles. Why was it important to tell the story through multiple voices?
The rotating viewpoints came about because it started as a screenplay, and I was writing with an ensemble in mind rather than just one main character. When I started working on the novel, I saw this as a way to explore love, fear, pain, family, betrayal, and unexpected connection through a kaleidoscope rather than a single lens.
What did you want readers to understand about the difference between loving someone and being able to let them go?
I wanted readers to understand that love and holding on are not the same thing. We often mistake sacrifice, rescue, or hope for love, when sometimes the most loving act is accepting that another person’s journey belongs to them, not to us. Letting someone go isn’t an act of indifference. It’s often the hardest expression of love because it requires us to surrender the illusion that we can change someone through our own persistence. We can offer compassion, forgiveness, and an open door, but we can’t live another person’s life or make their choices for them. In many ways, Before Closure asks whether closure is something another person gives us, or something we choose for ourselves.
What do you hope readers who have experienced family fractures or unanswered questions take away from the novel?
I’ve often said that I’m a storyteller with one goal: to make people feel less alone. If someone finds themselves in these pages, feels that tingle of recognition, and realizes how weirdly, wonderfully, beautifully complicated life and love can be while also believing, even for a moment, that maybe it’s going to be okay, then I’ve done my job. We don’t always get the answers we’re looking for, but that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t worth it.
Author Links: Amazon | Goodreads
In three days, Clayton is convinced his wife will return. It will be their fortieth wedding anniversary, and he believes she’ll come back to celebrate and rebuild what’s been broken.
Frankie and Jules aren’t so sure. Frankie has gone numb in the wake of his own relationship’s collapse, and Jules is barely holding a fragile marriage together. As one Iowa summer weekend unfolds, each of them must face an invitation to rethink the future they were expecting.
Told with sharp insight and quiet compassion, Before Closure is a tender portrait of love stretched thin, the burden of unspoken truths, and the messy grace of daring to live.
Secrets and Trauma
The Words She Left Behind tells your story as you become the caretaker for your estranged aunt and uncover, through journals, letters, and the devastation of Alzheimer’s, a more complicated woman than anyone understood. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written with the intention of creating a timeline of events leading up to my aunt’s diagnosis. After unexpectedly finding my aunt’s journals, I realized there were profound secrets between the pages. I felt an intense urge to get to the core of her anger and hatred towards my family. Through the process of reading, interviewing, and research, I was able to find secrets and trauma, which then led me to build empathy and forgiveness. With an understanding of what had happened in my aunt’s life, I was able to share the details of my discoveries with my mother, her sister. We eventually all found healing due to the words she left behind in her journals.
When you found Toni’s journals, letters, and stored belongings, did your understanding of her change all at once or slowly over time?
The healing happened over time. At the same time I was reading her journals, I was also forming a relationship with my aunt–a relationship I never had with her. Through both experiences, I found compassion and empathy for her. This journey of forgiveness took over a year because there was so much hatred built up for almost twenty years.
How did caring for Toni reshape your relationship with your mother, Mary, and your understanding of their history as sisters?
My mother and I have always been close. Mary also never gave up hope that one day she and her sister could rebuild their relationship. At first, it was very difficult for my mother, but she eventually got to a place where love was able to grow between her and Toni again. It’s now a beautiful relationship. This was my goal all along–a gift to my mother.
Author Links: Linktree
If I’m going to be brutally honest,
Pain Bleeds a Heroine follows a suffrage strategist as she transforms imprisonment, political resistance, and personal sacrifice into a nationwide campaign to force the US government toward women’s voting rights. What inspired you to tell Alice Paul’s story in screenplay form?
There’s a statistic out there that says only 20% of Americans read books nowadays, and the statistic for people who read historical biographies is hard to even measure. It’s that small. Alice Paul deserves recognition that’s above 20%. That’s why I wrote this piece for movie theaters, where audience appeal for historical works is significantly higher.
How did you balance historical accuracy with the heightened, action-driven portrayal of Alice Paul?
I understand most people haven’t studied screenwriting, so I’ll break it down for everybody. You could have one scene in a movie taken from multiple real-life occurrences—perhaps several—because the main thing every producer wants is brevity, brevity, brevity. A screenplay is only supposed to be 90 to 120 pages long. As you can imagine, it’s extremely complicated to squeeze a life story into 120 pages. Which is why a screenwriter has to be very creative when they shove several true stories into one scene over and over until they get to 120 pages. Obviously a great deal of the dialogue was my imagination at play (as is every other screenwriter’s of historical masterpieces) since we don’t know ANY of the behind-the-scenes whisperings from over 100 years ago, but I spent an absurd amount of time in my attempt to make everything as accurate as possible.
Which scene involving the imprisoned suffragists was the most difficult or meaningful for you to write?
If I’m going to be brutally honest, I’ve been starved and beaten by prison guards, so I have an idea of what those suffragists went through when they were protesting conditions while incarcerated. Being hidden away from polite society allows correctional officers to behave in ways that can be shocking and unbelievable to the average individual. But it meant a lot to expose a fraction of the realities of confinement.
How did you approach developing figures such as Lucy Burns, Dora Lewis, and Inez Milholland alongside Alice?
I thoroughly enjoyed writing Lucy Burns’s character. To me, she had the most personality. There’s a line I gave her that she said in real life while incarcerated: “I am fat and flourishing.” That one sentence is a beautiful portrait of a warrior that can have fun when they’re at their worst. It revealed more of her than anything else I wrote on this one suffragist in Pain Bleeds a Heroine. Each one of these “secondary” women demonstrated characteristics Alice Paul was lacking. Lucy Burns = fun, Dora Lewis = caring, Inez Milholland = charismatically likeable. Alice Paul had practically NO personality. *lol* She wasn’t known to laugh or joke. She was just a straight-up soldier, so focused, so goal-oriented. Obtaing the right to vote was her obsession. Writing that just now choked me up. I’ve never read about another historical figure I’ve admired more, other than Booker T. Washington. He’s right there with her in my eyes. It brought me an abundance of pleasure highlighting the attributes of these surrounding characters to FURTHER showcase the strength of Alice Paul.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
The Making of Luvafoodie Brand
The Making of Luvafoodie® Brand is Michelle Mazzara’s entrepreneurial memoir, tracing the development of Luvafoodie from an online dating site for food lovers into a line of spices, beverages, pet products, and other consumable goods. Organized chronologically, the book follows Mazzara’s early sales career, her experiments with several small businesses, and the 2014 launch of Luvafoodie. Its central subject is the practical and emotional process of building a brand through repeated adaptation. Mazzara’s candid statement that “life has no instruction or manual to live by” captures the book’s view of entrepreneurship as a sequence of experiments, setbacks, decisions, and discoveries.
The memoir’s strongest quality is its detailed account of persistence at the operational level. Mazzara describes product development, grocery-store demonstrations, distribution challenges, cash-flow pressure, media appearances, vendor pitches, and the demands of running what remained largely a one-person company. The transformation of Luvafoodie is especially revealing. When the dating platform couldn’t attract enough users to become profitable, she redirected the brand toward caramels and later toward shelf-stable spice blends. These episodes give the book the texture of a working entrepreneur’s journal, showing how a business identity can emerge through close attention to customer response, retail realities, and the founder’s own strengths.
Mazzara also connects the company’s evolution to major events in her personal life. Her heart-disease diagnosis and medical crisis led to the creation of salt-free spice blends and to advocacy work with the American Heart Association. Her devotion to her dog Lucy inspires products for pets, while the later arrival of Daisy prompts another brand concept. These connections make Luvafoodie feel less like an abstract commercial enterprise and more like an extension of its founder’s experiences, relationships, and values. “At the end of the day, it is not about what I did but who I impacted,” she writes, a sentence that expresses the memoir’s movement from personal ambition toward service, health, and connection.
The concluding recipe section complements the memoir by translating the brand’s clean-eating mission into practical dishes, including salads, seafood, chicken, vegetables, baked goods, and dog treats. It also gives readers a direct sense of how the products Mazzara spent years developing are intended to be used. Taken as a whole, the book is a personal business history shaped by resilience, product innovation, health advocacy, and the pursuit of meaningful work. Its straightforward first-person voice keeps the focus on lived experience, while its ten-year scope offers an instructive portrait of a founder whose company grows through continual reinvention rather than a single decisive breakthrough.
Pages: 131 | ASIN : B0DLH84YB8
Become Relentlessly Curious
The UnConventional Strategist is a conversational business strategy built around the idea that strategic thinking comes from experience, curiosity, judgment, and action. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This is the book I wish someone had handed me early in my career. Maybe I could have avoided a few mistakes—or at least made different ones. I wrote it with a servant leader’s mindset, hoping to mentor not just the handful of people I’ve worked with directly over the years, but anyone looking for practical guidance on becoming a better strategist, product manager, innovator, or wanting to manage their life with intention and goals in mind. One of the greatest compliments I’ve received is when people tell me, “This book sounds just like you.” They can hear my voice in their heads as they read it, and that’s exactly what I wanted.
Was there a particular moment in your career when you realized strategy was less about having all the answers and more about making better decisions with uncertainty?
There wasn’t one dramatic moment—it was a pattern that repeated itself over my career. The more responsibility I was given, the less complete the information became. I realized that the people who were successful weren’t the ones who waited until they had all the answers. They were the ones who could make good decisions with imperfect information, adjust when new facts emerged, and keep moving forward. That’s really what strategy is. It’s not certainty—it’s judgment under uncertainty. It’s trusting that gut instinct but balancing it with experience.
How can professionals learn to listen for what customers, colleagues, or competitors are not saying?
Most people spend their time listening to answers. Strategists listen to gaps. They pay attention to what’s avoided, what keeps coming up indirectly, what people hesitate to say, or where actions don’t match words. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t hidden in what someone tells you—it’s hidden in what they assume, ignore, or can’t quite articulate.
What is one strategic habit you believe every professional should develop?
Become relentlessly curious. Have an insatiable appetitive for knowledge. Look beyond what’s obvious. Every successful person I’ve known asks better questions than everyone else. They don’t assume they already know the answer. They stay curious about customers, competitors, technology, and even their own assumptions. Curiosity compounds over time, and eventually it becomes judgment. Trust your gut but temper it with experience.
Get Straight Talk from the School of Hard Knocks
Jay Nakagawa’sThe UnConventional Strategist will be your ultimate guide for strategic skillsets, a new mindset and creative edge. Tools that you should have been taught 10 years ago.Do you want to see strategic opportunities before everyone else?
Do you desire to escape career autopilot and become indispensable?
Do you need to make better decisions in the middle of the chaos around you?
Do you seek to innovate in environments that aren’t built to kill your creativity?
Becoming strategic is a challenge. It doesn’t happen because you read the right frameworks or memorized the right buzzwords. It happens through awkward starts, wrong turns, and hard-earned scars.
The UnConventional Strategist cuts through buzzwords and frameworks to deliver a practical, experience-driven guide for leaders who want to think more clearly, anticipate change, and practice real strategy—not strategic theater.
-Robert Bunchek, Strategy and Intelligence Professional
Officer & VP Strategic Intelligence, Fortune 30 company
You’ll learn …Why perfect kills progress faster than failure.
Why validation always trumps wishful thinking.
Why knowing yourself is the ultimate competitive edge.
Why asking the uncomfortable question no one else will flip the whole game.
Throughout The UnConventional Strategist, you’ll discover the elements of becoming strategic in thinking and approach.
Jay Nakagawa has lived through the School of Hard Knocks. As an international speaker and consultant, he leaves his audiences and clients more grounded using his bold moves, resources, and strategies.
Reel Around the Fountain
Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.
The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.
Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.
The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1590218013
