Luigi: The Making and the Meaning

In this rudderless examination, Esquire writer-at-large Richardson (My Father the Spy) attempts to uncover and contextualize Luigi Mangione’s ideology and the outpouring of support following his alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Richardson sifts through Mangione’s trail of online reviews, Reddit posts, and DMs, analyzing his beliefs about AI, nuclear power, masculinity, and psychedelics, and cobbling together a loose portrait of a “kindhearted, deep-thinking, tech bro–adjacent, woke-mind-virus social justice warrior” who “wanted to rise above political categories.” The book gets the most mileage out of Mangione’s Goodreads reviews of texts ranging from The Lorax to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future. The latter allows the author to expand his focus to Mangione’s “kindred spirits”—other furious young male extremists inspired by “Uncle Ted” who likewise flirted with the necessity of violence. Indeed, the most illuminating part of the book comes from Kaczynski himself, with whom Richardson corresponds. The author delves not only into Kaczynski’s “lively mind” but also his own fascination with Kaczynski’s perspective on dangerously accelerating technologies. These efforts most effectively get at the book’s looming question: “If all this is true, don’t I have a responsibility to do something?” But the account’s too-ambitious scope, as it ranges from interviews with Mangione’s supporters to a recap of 14th-century peasant rebellions, blunts its sharpness. Readers will be left disappointed. (Nov.)