In today’s KEEN ON show, I talk to Jonathan Rosen, the author of The Best Mind, the tragic story of his close childhood friend Michael Laudor. Rosen’s account of Laudor’s life is also featured on the May cover of The Atlantic.
“American Madness”, the magazine screams. But this chillingly surreal story is as much about the medical, legal and intellectual madness industry in America as it is about Michael Laudor. Nobody gets out of this well. Not Yale Law School which turned a blind eye to Laudor’s psychosis. Not The New York Times, which gushed about Laudor’s schizophrenic genius or the New York publishing houses which competed to publish his books. Not the local law or medical authorities which failed to institutionalize Laudor in spite of his openly violent behavior. And certainly not the late twentieth century American intelligentsia, in its juvenile obsession with Michel Foucault’s equally juvenile theory of madness.
American Madness