99.9

“The Party.” Excerpt from an unidentified interview with Mailer. Rolling Stone, December 30, 110. In this brief piece, Mailer discusses the end of the Cold War and the “subterranean shock” that it gave Americans: “When the Soviet Union went out without bloodshed or crisis, like a balloon slowly losing its air, a lot of people in America, deep down, felt cheated.” For the new millennium he offers the hope that society will realize that the incredible changes in technology are dangerous: “more information, more connection, is not going to make us more learned—we could lose our connection to existence itself.”