RM: I remember my roommate in college showing that piece to me and going, “Is this even allowed? Can you do this?” It blew my mind. I just could not believe that someone managed to pull that off. It was obviously a very experimental time for GQ and Esquire, but still: how did that go down?

JJS: I couldn’t even tell you. It was like a group psychosis thing. But, no, I mean the back story is literal. I tell it at the beginning of the piece with no fabrication whatsoever. They sent me over to Oxford to this place called The Future of Humanity Institute, and it was just kind of a bust. I didn’t know enough to ask the right questions, and they were kind of just giving me stuff they’d said before. But GQ had already given me half the money, and I had to write something, so I thought, there is one end-of-the-world scenario that I’m interested in…

RM: So, you’ve described where you grew up as “rural, white trash, southern Indiana.” When you’re writing, do you ever think of what your old childhood friends back home might think, and does that affect the writing at all?

JJS: Definitely. I’m still speaking to them in some ways, in a lot of my writing. And I imagine that when I get back to fiction, they’ll be a part of it.

RM: In what way does it affect the writing? Does it rein you in? Does it shift your politics?

JJS: I don’t think so, no. It’s not political at all, or even formal. It’s just as a pure emotional attachment—a kind of haunting thing.

RM: The reason I ask about tone is that your tone always seems to have that high-low brow balance, one of a couple of things that—probably much to your exasperation, at this point—gets you compared to DFW. Is that just a conscious decision, or a coincidence of you both having grown up in a relatively similar corner of the country, where it’s considered rude to sound too smart?

JJS: I would say, it goes back to that Twain, Terry Southern stuff. I liked idiomatic American English. But at the same time, based on the stuff I’d grown up reading, I couldn’t see any reason to deny that voice an intellectual level if it wanted to have one.