“I go to extraordinary lengths not to hear what people are saying about me. But that is itself a form of, well, it’s a form of self-protection because I know that all I have to do is hear one phrase—somebody will report to me all innocently, oh, somebody said such-and-such about me or about something I wrote, like I did this piece for the New Yorker a year-and-a-half ago where I made some, I thought, sensible points about the reality of climate change and the unavoidability of radical climate change, and people said, ‘Oh God, somebody called you a birdbrain’.”