Shankar Vedantam

When we count the collateral damage that people with obsessions leave in their wake, especially when those obsessions only produce the unreadable tome on the evil eye or an unpublishable encyclopedia on folk music, obsessions start to look like folly.

Trouble is, you usually do not know whether an obsession is a great quest or a great folly until it's over.

Shortly after this episode first aired in 2019, Stasia shared a version of her father's encyclopedia with the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

It's now available online.

We have a link to it in the show notes.

More recently, we reached back out to Stasia, and she said she remained skeptical of the idea that her father was a genius.

What she does know is that he was a man of many secrets.

She's discovered even more pseudonyms that he used over the years and many more details about his relationships with women.

But it's likely none of those revelations were as shocking to her as that first phone call she received all those years ago.

Across that crackly phone line, those words, your father is a crook, must have landed like a thunderclap.

Learning that your parent is the villain of someone else's story is painful.

Secrets like this can cause deep ruptures in families.

Now, the secrets that most of us hold are not this weighty, but even small secrets can be a heavy burden.

Not long ago, we heard from a listener named John who's been carrying a secret like this.

When he was in college, John studied abroad in Ethiopia.

He lived in a small town, teaching English to high schoolers.

One of John's brightest students would hang around him a lot.

This student was fascinated by the United States and hungry to learn what it would be like to live there.

John felt bad about avoiding his student, but he didn't know what else to do.

This came to a head when John and a few friends decided to take a weekend vacation.