I'm reading ... Bad Blood

We’re clearly in a golden age of grifting. There’s something about our particular cultural and political moment that signals it’s okay to lie, inflate, and defraud, because everyone’s doing it. But I think the flipside of this is the hunger we all have now to follow these stories through, and to see people held responsible for their lies, inflations, and fraud.

Bad Blood scratches that itch. Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou traces the evolution of his reporting on what would become a huge, still-unresolved scandal – the alleged fraud behind the Theranos blood-testing technology and its so-called wunderkind promoter, Elizabeth Holmes.

I read a lot of nonfiction, at least as much as I read fiction, and I think of it as necessary wisdom in an age of fast-flowing information. It’s delicious to be able to slow down and immerse yourself in a story like this, meticulously reported and expertly analyzed, to get in behind the lies and façades and to observe what was really going on the whole time. In the case of Theranos, it appears there wasn’t much beyond hype.

Carreyrou owns this story. He wasn’t the first to report on it (he makes it clear how he was tipped to it) but he has the tenacity to stick with it, despite a highly placed wall of defense in the guise of elder statesmen and Theranos board members like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis. But the deeper the rot the more complete the collapse, once one piece is removed and discredited. Carreyrou’s reporting knocked the whole thing over.

Writing a book that is both relevant and timely, and deeply reported, is an incredible feat in this era of saturation coverage, and Carreyrou has timed it perfectly.