At 9:00 a.m. on September 18, 2010, a Saturday, I received an email from someone named Mitchell Heisman. The subject line read "suicide note" and attached to the email was a large PDF. About one hour after I received the email, a thirty-five-year-old man named Mitchell Heisman shot himself to death on the steps of Harvard University's Memorial Church - while a Yom Kippur service was going on inside.
I had never heard of Mitchell Heisman and suspect that, with a few exceptions, none of the other people who received the same email knew him either. Although I never open attachments from strangers, that day I did. The file contained a book manuscript, 1,905 pages long, including a 20-page bibliography. I couldn't help but notice that my book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World was in the list of references. I then discovered that Heisman discussed the book in great detail and in fact had pulled many quotes from it. I was shaken by the possibility that something I wrote could have somehow contributed to someone's decision to end his own life. I started reading the manuscript from the beginning.
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