Almost immediately after Luigi Mangione was arrested last week in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, you could go pretty deep into the rabbit hole of Mangione’s particular internet. At the top of his X feed, I noticed a reference to the work of Tim Urban, the popular blogger, essayist and author of the website Wait but Why and a 2023 book dilating on the problems of uncivil political discourse, called “What’s Our Problem?”

“I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century,” Mangione wrote in January, and scrolling down his X feed, I saw one Wait but Why post after another.

This was striking to me for many reasons, including the way it made a 26-year-old accused of perpetrating an act of spectacular political violence seem not like a creature of the internet’s radical left but of its contrarian, podcast-y center. Another reason was that Tim is an old friend of mine. On Friday, we spoke for an hour about Mangione; what follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

David Wallace-Wells: When you saw that the alleged shooter was a big admirer of yours, what was your reaction?

Tim Urban: Honestly, confusion and sadness. Confusion about how someone who really likes my stuff could also be a person who does this.

If I imagine the Venn diagram circles of “people who not only like my stuff but evangelize about it” and “those who not just support political assassination but do it themselves” … if he is in fact guilty, he might be the only person in the overlap. And what that tells me is that, most likely, he had a really bad mental health break of some kind.